Yesterday I noticed that my Gmail account has been upgraded to allow me to check mail on other accounts. It occurred to me at that point that I didn’t want to give my password to Google because the email account is also a shell account on my server and that its password can be used with sudo to do things with root access on the server.
So today I went and created a brand new mail account that’s not able to log in via the shell at all, and then configured /etc/aliases so that all of the mail that was being sent to my shell account is now sent to the new mail account. I then let Google have POP access to the new account, and now virtually all of my personal email is being shuttled to my Gmail account.
The first thing I notice is that Gmail’s spam filters are better than mine. I use amavisd on my server to filter spam get rid of viruses, and while it (and some milter rules I set up for Postfix) toss out hundreds of unwanted email messages a day, generally 100 to 200 still make it through. Gmail seems to be correctly marking virtually all of them as spam.
The other advantage is consolidation. I usually forget to open Thunderbird and download the personal email that is sent to the addresses that I was hosting myself. Now it’s all in one big inbox.
At this point I’m kind of wondering why I didn’t just set up a forward for my personal email to Google in the first place, since I could have done that as well a long time ago.