Today was my last full day at IBM; I decided to spam thank some close soon-to-be-ex-colleagues before I left. Since I wasn’t sure that those who wanted to respond would do so before my IBM email address expired, I directed replies to an address at a domain that I set up for my family (let’s call it example.us, just to keep the real spammers at bay).

Mail for example.us is MX’ed to Google Apps servers; I’ve set up forwarding there for each of us to our real preferred GMail addresses. This has the advantage of letting me move from GMail if I want to, without anyone being the wiser.

But today, I discovered that Google isn’t consistent in its mail filtering. A friend at work thanked me for sending her the note and mentioned that she’d replied — but I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen her reply. And when I searched the GMail account, there was nothing from her. But when I looked at the mailbox on example.us, her note was there. And, in fact, there were several replies that hadn’t made it to GMail but were safely in the inbox for example.us.

So I guess I need to rethink my mail strategy and let mail for example.us stay there instead of forwarding it to GMail.

Life was easier when all my mail went to singer@almaden.ibm.com! (I’d worry about spammers getting that address, except that it’s been visible on the Web and well-spammed for many years, and, of course, it expires tomorrow.)