[Gerard]

I use GMail strictly as a backup email address for the rare time when my domain email server's built-in anti-spam functions block something necessary, like sending or receiving a RAR archive for instance. For 99.9% or more of my uses, my @luthier.ca address and nPOPuk are more than adequate. nPOPuk opens in about half a second, updates my POP server list in a few seconds at most, and with filters set to auto-mark the spam for deletion from the server, I deal with my morning email maintenance ritual in under a minute. Haven't ever used Outlook for email after an initial test in 2000 left me feeling like wow, what a dog... And Outlook Contacts is something I have dallied with as a backup for my Pocket PCs over the years many times. Always ended up frustrated with duplicates, crashes, deleted items on the PPC (though I ALWAYS configure it to keep items on the device and overwrite those on the PC; Activesync simply refuses to obey that command, period.

Thanks to a recent series of horrible errors in Activesync, I no longer have that software installed. No need here for something apparently designed to mangle my contacts list. I use Pocket Outlook Exporter to regularly dump a small CSV file (currently 142KB for 817 contacts, many with notes), then upload that to GMail Contacts. The whole export/upload process takes about 2 minutes. I'm not saying Gmail is flawless in 'synching' contacts in this way, in fact it does tend to make mistakes and my contacts total gets out of whack a bit. So to work around this, I delete all from their server first, then upload afresh. Slightly tricky this, as Google only allows 500 deletions at a time. So I choose a few letters of the alphabet to sort by, G and H seem to work well for me, and searching my contacts for these I eventually get a list of a few hundred which I can select all > delete, then do another select all > delete for the rest of the list. Uploading the renewed CSV file is a perfect way to get my online contacts backup after that.

I won't be using the massive memory store GMail offers simply because I like having local control of my email. I keep local backups in spades, so no worries about data loss. In my opinion, all this talk of 'the cloud' is fine enough for relatively trivial things like keeping up with twitter feeds or social networking sites, but where business is concerned, give me local, multi-format readable email every time. nPOPuk saves in a plaintext DAT, readable in any text editor. That goes beyond mere backup copies, into failsafe text availability regardless of which software comes and goes.

I've nothing against GMail per se, and know what you mean about it seeming to be a bit more professional than the others mentioned, and certainly worlds better than having an @excite.com or @aol.com address... but really, why risk your business with a service which has no particular concern as to your success or failure as an individual or company? If they dumped all your email tomorrow, for example, would they even apologise? Would your cries for help earn you anything more than a form letter? Would it matter to Google if you went to a few forum sites and complained of their lack of concern? Would your clients understand, if you failed to meet obligations due to loss of critical information?