E-mail woes (continued)

I’m one of those people that has too many e-mail addresses.

I check all of them pretty regularly - even my spam-catching account - but I have a hard time picking one to run with.

For a while I thought the address from my school would work, but then it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to be able to keep that address for life, so that wasn’t going to work.

Currently, my favorite is j at jason-preston.com. I access at least four e-mail accounts through Outlook right now, and that works pretty well, but every time I log into gmail, I get seduced by the ridiculously nice search feature and the coolness of the conversation view.

I’m really tempted to switch all my accounts to “forward to gmail” and try and use my gmail address as my main account. I double checked, and it looks like it is possible (although sometimes difficult) to backup your gmail messages to a computer, which I would want to do regularly.

The problem seems to be that while I like having a mail client on my computer (and I think I really would miss Outlook), I use both my laptop and my desktop every day, and it’s annoying to avoid checking my e-mail while I’m on my laptop because there’s no good way to sync the two copies of Outlook.

I’m tempted to try, but I’m not sure I’m going to do it.

Some day, I need to find a killer e-mail app and address solution, move everything to that one place, and stick with it.