Gmail is wonderful. It gives you around 1GB of storage space for no-spam email. It can give you even more.
How I use it:
- When I get my mail to my laptop, I do not delete it from the server
- When I get mail on my main machine, I have it setup so that messages are deleted after a month of residing on the server. Yes, Outlook has this option. This gives me more than enough time to grab the messages from the server with my laptop, before they are deleted.
- I have a message rule on my main machine which forwards all incoming messages to my Gmail account
Why?
I love having all messages stored. And I have everything stored on my main machine. But, since Gmail has 1GB of fast-search-capable storage I prefer browsing through my mail using remote Gmail than my local Outlook. Implicitly I get web access to all my email.
We're probably more that three years away from achieving this on our local machines.