Six years ago I blogged that I only use my Gmail account for mailing lists and asked people not to sent direct / personal email to my @gmail.com account.
Recently I decided to give Google Plus a second chance. I had stopped using it completely because it seemed to be "Facebook for geeks" and I try really hard to keep my tech life and my "real" life partitioned on the web: Facebook for IRL friends that I share interests with and have at least had dinner with; Twitter for tech chatter and news. Nowadays, many of my Facebook friends are also on G+ (or have migrated from Facebook to G+), and along the way Google enabled G+ for Google Accounts, which is where I've managed my corfield.org email for several years. And, yes, G+ has gotten better. It's still primarily "Facebook for geeks" but there's more interesting content from people I know in real life and I figured it might be a nice avenue for "musings on technology" that don't really belong on my blog (and are too long for Twitter anyway). And as Facebook gets more and more annoying with its filtering, its ads, its auto-play videos, and its somewhat weird privacy settings, maybe G+ will see more and more non-geek users, which in turn will make it more appealing to me...
Now, having two G+ accounts - both corfield.org and gmail.com - is a royal pain in the bejeesus because you get circle notifications on two addresses and you end up having to keep two different browsers open, each logged in via a different account. Google doesn't let you merge accounts. Boo! So I decided to strip G+ from my gmail.com account, and just use my corfield.org Google Account for all my Google needs. That had been working out pretty well so about three weeks ago I decided to effectively shut down my gmail.com account: I started switching all my mailing list subscriptions over to corfield.org and set up rules in Google Mail to push mailing list content to folders so I didn't have to see it in my desktop client (I really like Google Mail on the web for reading mailing lists!).
In that three weeks, according to Google's "Account Activity Report", I've received 5,200 emails from almost 900 contacts, and I've sent just over 300 emails to just over 100 contacts. I'll be interested to see what a full month looks like on corfield.org now that I have disconnected everything from my gmail.com account.
So, six years ago I warned not to send personal / direct email to gmail.com because it might get lost in the flood of mailing lists. Today, if you send any email there, it might as well be /dev/null - I no longer use gmail.com. corfield.org, on the other hand, still remains the best way to contact me!
