Friends, family, randoms: I’ve liberated my stephen.bolen [at] gmail [dot] com address in favor of activating Google Apps for Domains and using hi [at] sbolen [dot] me in it’s place.

My reasons are twofold:

1. My almost 9 year old Gmail inbox was pushing 80% capacity of the allotted space. When I was running the Sports Cartel Blog Network/Sports Lounge LLC, I was trading enormous Photoshop files with printers and taking on rather large attachments from advertising partners. This was problematic, not just because I wanted to keep everything business-related for obvious reasons, but because when you have that many messages in the mix with messages from friends and family, it can make searching through results pretty difficult (think: Page 1 of thousands).
2. Have you ever had to give out your email address to someone? Maybe a cashier at a store, maybe someone trying to send you something, maybe even a co-worker who wants to see if you’re up for hanging out over the weekend? s-t-e-p-h-e-n-dot-b-o-l-e-n-at-g-m-a-i-l-dot-com was a mouthful. hi-at-s-b-o-l-e-n-dot-me is so much faster. And, as an added bonus, is easier to fill out on any sort of contact/registration form.

And, some bonus tech-related reasons:

1. I’m about to drop a 10 year registration on this domain through Namecheap – my favorite domain registrar, by the way – so this domain isn’t going anywhere.
2. The MX records are all pointing to Google’s servers, so keeping my Google Mail running for 10 years – even without a server to power other web services – isn’t a problem.
3. I get to start at inbox zero and play traffic cop with all of the emails that come through with filtering. This means routing all bacn from social networks, et cetera, through the ringer and into an archived folder, thus skipping the inbox. BOOM.
4. If I ever come close to the storage capacity on this Google Mail account, I can always upgrade to the business plan for $5/mo and nab an extra 25GB of storage.

So, in a nut, I really like GMail. I like the clean interface. I like the clean, easy set-up on my iOS devices. I like the fact that I can essentially start out fresh and still use all of the other Google services I enjoy, but with way less clutter.

And, I can also keep my browsing history private.