Switching to web-based mail

I realized this week that I've never really sorted my email communication out properly. My first email account was a work one, back in the mid-1990s. It was all very new, then. As I began writing about wine on the internet, I used my work e-mail address for all my correspondence. Then, when I registered wineanorak as a domain, I began a dual email system, using both my work address and my wineanorak address in tandem. This carried on until earlier this year, when I left the Novartis Foundation.

At this stage I began to think about shifting from a POP3-based mail system (my wineanorak address) to a web-based email system (in my case, googlemail). The advantage with a POP3-based system is that you download all your e-mails onto your local machine, so you can access them without being online.

The advantage of a web-based system is that you can access your emails fully wherever you are, and from any machine, as long as you have an internet connection. I have three different laptops and a desktop machine that I use regularly. Currently only one machine can be used for my emails. These days, internet connections are everywhere, no matter where you travel to. So it's a bit of a no-brainer: web-based email has to be the way to go.

Googlemail can pick up your POP3 emails, so today I switched completely to Gmail, which I'd been using for a while in tandem with my wineanorak account. All the mail from my wineanorak account will now come through Gmail. It seems strange, but as from today, all my emails will be fused into a single, efficient system.