spam

around four years ago google did something that changed my life. gmail.

aside from the fact that gmail incorporated google's revolutionary search engine for all of your previously sent and recieved messages, there was the size factor: 1000MB (1 gig)! at the time my yahoo account yielded a 25MB capacity, and worse yet my hotmail account had 10MB. not only did gmail offer enormous storage, but that size was guaranteed to increase.

when i log in today, this is the message i see:
"You are currently using 1690 MB (23%) of your 7271 MB"

it's comforting to know that i have not only have space to spare, it's growing. i don't need spend my precious time debating if i want to keep or toss any number of emails.

another thing that gmail boasted was a "smart" spam filter. every other mail provider bragged about intelligent spam filters -which worked as well as a screen door on a submarine. important messages from known contacts were diverted away from the inbox, while adds for horny hot teens were delivered to my inbox.

over four years later and i'm just starting to appreciate gmail's intelligent spam filter. to date, there's anywhere from 600-800 spam emails in my gmail account's spam section at any given time. since gmail automatically deletes spam messages that are over 30 days old. that means that i receive on average 23 spam emails each day. however, before composing this post, i didn't even know this as no spam emails make it into my inbox. yep, their spam detection is just that good.

before gmail, i was the spam filter. i logged into my email inbox, to see 30 new messages each day. after i was done sending the 27 spam messages to my junk box i was almost too tired to read the emails that weren't from spammers. of course, if i had the time to do so i'd go into the junk folder afterward just to make sure that none of my wanted emails landed in the unwanted junk folder, because every week or so i'd lose an important email.

i'm constantly reminded just how much i depend on the gmail spam filter. sometimes the things that work best for you, are the ones that you never notice.

i don't want to disregard all of the awesome features that gmail has incorporated like gchat and aim in your inbox, labels, filters, colors, themes, the list goes on. but i see the results of those things daily.