[bradknowles]

I have a gmail account, but I use it for almost nothing. I don't trust them as far as I can throw the company. All it takes is one tiny infraction of some rule you never knew about, and suddenly you lose your entire Gmail account, your youtube account, and everything else associated with gmail.

My main account is on a personal vanity domain that I've owned since 1995, through the ISP that was my main BBS at the time, and they had just recently gotten on the Internet. I was also working at AOL as their Sr. Internet Mail Administrator, and I knew how hard it was to run a reasonably good mail system, and I didn't want to have to do all that work all over again on my personal vanity domain. The anti-spam system used by my ISP is decent, but not great. On top of that, I layer a Bayesian-based anti-spam program that ties into my mail client, for further filtering. Plus my client has anti-spam filtering of its own, and I have hundreds and hundreds of manual filtering rules that I've written over the decades.

Even with all those filtering layers, I still get at least a dozen or more spam mail messages that get past all the defenses, and I have to manually delete them and run them through the retraining algorithms.

And I still don't trust any "unsubscribe me" link that I see, unless I know for sure that I signed up for service with that company.