I got this email from a recruiter today, with a position in a place I would never consider even visiting again. No problem, I have a canned script for replying to that sort of email.

Except that as of this morning, I don’t.

I used to have about a dozen canned scripts that I used for various things such as answering the message about the “urgent opening” in a Frozen Northern City in a state with a high state income tax, and a high city income on top of that. Or the one I had about when I plan to start back with a business I currently have in mothballs. Or a form letter I send to would-be guest authors who want to submit something to one of my many sites. Or one of my personal favorites, the one that I send to spammers that want to sell me high-priced SEO services.

All gone.

Not a biggie, but just another one of those things the programmers working on Gmail occasionally do to piss me off. Yeah, I can go through the process of incrementally re-creating my canned responses (some of them needed re-writing anyway) as I need them, but I feel like that is something I should not have to do. If I do, I will probably just keep them in a folder on DropBox to copy & paste so that Google can’t just delete them again.

On the other hand, maybe I won’t. I think I have learned a way to make Thunderbird email client portable without having to use an external drive, and I’m about to run some experiments to see if that works reasonably well. If it does, then I can pretty much forget Gmail. I have not used any of my Gmail addresses for anything important in quite a while, although I still forward some of my other email accounts to Google to take advantage of the spam filtering and have a centralized place to access all of it.

So all I really have to do at this point is stop forwarding my email to Gmail. I can then forward my Gmail to one of my own domains, so that I won’t miss anything from someplace I’ve forgotten to update my email address.

At least not before Gmail as we currently know it gets shut down.

That’s when, not if. I firmly believe that all of the changes made to Gmail over the past couple of years are focused on eventually monetizing that service. Remember, to Google, you are not a customer, you are their property.