Blogging Tips

In many peoples eyes, Google has taken on the mantle of being the biggest, baddest and most evil internet company online today because of how much control, influence and power it has (a title previously owned by Microsoft). However, there is no denying how useful some of their applications are (e.g. Google Maps).

For me, their best application is Gmail. I was lucky enough to get a beta invite to try out Gmail many years ago. The thought of getting 1GB of storage was encouraging, particularly at a time when you had to delete emails regularly because of lack of space.

It wasn’t until I stopped using Outlook Express, filtered all of my business emails through Gmail and started using it everyday that I truly appreciated how great Gmail is. Seriously, I can’t think of another application which is so vital to me working online. And since purchasing an Android powered phone, I now get notifications about new emails to my Gmail account within seconds of receiving it, which is incredibly handy when I’m away from the computer.

Spam Filter

At the moment I filter about 14 email addresses through my Gmail account. One of these email addresses is about 7 or 8 years old and I used this email address to sign up to pretty much everything ; affiliate accounts, services, discussion forums etc.

As you can imagine, that email account receives a lot of spam. Infact, most of the emails sent to that email address would be classed as spam (though I still have a lot of important accounts tied to it so can’t stop using it). Gmail deals with it all and sends them to the spam folder. Unfortunately, many legitimate emails seem to get sent to the spam folder too.

I didn’t notice how bad it was until I checked the spam folder a few days ago. Over the course of a few weeks, about a dozen or so legitimate emails sent to one of my Blogging Tips email addresses were placed in there (mostly advertising and guest post requests). I check my email regularly every day and like to reply to important emails promptly, so I was annoyed that I had not replied to these people within a day or so.

I know many of you have a similar email setup to me and use Gmail to receive all of your email addresses so I encourage you all to check your spam folder every few days to see if any important email has slipped through the net (this applies to all email users; AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo etc). At a guess I would say that between 3 and 4 percent of the emails in the spam folder were put there incorrectly.

Any email which is placed in your spam folder could potentially be very important to you and your blog so it is worth checking a few times a week.