Bronte Media

Last week my Apple laptop bit the dust. The motherboard died and with it any economical way of repairing the 1 month out of warranty computer.

My photos are zapped which is a real bummer but my email isn’t. That is because of Gmail and one huge and underestimated feature: Shadow sending. I used Thunderbird (Mozilla’s answer to Outlook) but every message I sent and received with my GMail account (which I use for my primary work account now) was synched with the web and kept even after my Apple died.

A lot of email servers can shadow your received mail but even then, usually you have to configure it in a certain way and storage is an issue. Having a shadow index of your sent items is hugely valuable because if you think about the documents you create (ppt, xls, doc etc.) nearly all of them were created to be emailed to someone. All of the important work that died with my laptop (save for one thing that was created the day it died and was a work in progress) could be safely restored from GMail within minutes.

In that respect, GMail is more than an email client and is almost a backup utility (with the signal that you would email a doc/xls/ppt to someone being the quality filter).