I’m waving a white flag. I give up. I’ve decided to no longer attempt to host my own email. I’ve hosted my own mail for years and years, and I’ve had enough. Why?

Hosting your email used to be pretty simple. You setup your SMTP server, got a mail client and used POP to access your mailbox. You set it up, and didn’t need to worry about it again. These days are long gone.

Today, hosting your own mailbox and exposing an SMTP server to the world, whether you want to or not, engages you in the global war on spam and phishing. To host my own email I had to deal with keeping 3 software packages current at all times, and pay a monthly service fee to a service provider to filter for viruses and spam for me. This simply takes up more time and is frankly too complicated to waste time on.

I’ve dumped this whole game and am now hosting thingelstad.com email using Google Apps for your Domain. Yes, Google now can index my mail and serve me ads. I don’t care. It’s tremendously easier, will save me a bunch of time, and cut my out of pocket cost by nearly $100 a year. This is a no brainer.

I’m happy to also say that I’ve been really impressed with Gmail. I find it’s actually faster than Thunderbird was for casual usage. And I can now give up the madness of trying to keep my address book synchronized.

I’m now a much happier netizen, and no longer am worried about versions of IMAP servers and SMTP daemons and having to worry about the latest spam, phishing and virus issues. Yeah!