Good advice about e-mail accounts and the Peek

Le Journal de la Peek has some excellent advice about setting up your e-mail accounts on the Peek, and how you can make it work with unsupported work e-mail accounts (my company uses Microsoft Exchange, which is not supported) and with your everyday private accounts…

What about our personal email? That’s where I correspond with family, but also it’s where mail arrives from spammers who feel my genitals are too short or too limp, or from Nigerian con artists who want our help with their multi-million dollar schemes. So we found we had to use another Google account as a filtration system, allowing only family and friends to make it into the Peek.

Basically, it’s a good idea — before your Peek even arrives — to set up a new Gmail account or other free e-mail account to serve as your “Peek account.” This way, you can have complete control over what appears in your Peek inbox, eliminating most if not all spam. Just take your existing e-mail account that you use all the time, and create rules or filters that control what gets forwarded to your new e-mail account you’ll be using as a primary Peek account.

For example, my primary private account on Gmail is, say, lulu@gmail.com. I log into lulu@gmail.com and create a bunch of filters for “safe” senders (basically a whitelist) like family and friends, or any e-mail news alert services I might like. I tell lulu@gmail.com to forward a copy of the safe mail to lulu2@gmail.com — the new “Peek account” I have set up.

It takes just a few minutes to do. And when your Peek arrives, you’ll already have this new, “clean” account all ready to go and to register with Peek.

Why a Peek?

Having read David Pogue’s glowing review in the New York Times, and following up reading other kind reviews for the Peek on other websites, I thought it just might be worth checking this thing out for $100. $20/month isn’t a super-cheap price, but quite doable for me, so I ordered a Peek from getpeek.com. (Good thing too, since apparently Targets were not putting them on the shelves right away on Monday the 15th.)

As for the inevitable question of Why would anyone want one of these… Listen: Not every person in the world can afford $30 for a monthly voice plan and another $30 or $40 for a data plan, on top of an expensive new phone — for two years of a contract. And not everyone wants to max out their credit cards just so they can have a God-Phone.

I have a cell phone. Pay as you go plan. Bare bones. Because I don’t spend every waking minute of my life yakking on my phone to friends and family (I see them in person!), I don’t give a crap about fancy ring tones, Google maps, listening to MP3s on my phone, surfing the web on an itty bitty screen, or sending 500 text messages a day to Twitter. I like my current phone, and I like my current non-monthly payments for cell service. And I hate dealing with phone companies. (In fact, I like my pay-as-you-go plan because I almost never have to deal with my phone company.)

The question is, why would someone like me want to pay $40, $50, $70 a month — locked in for two years — just to send e-mail from the road?

Basically, I need mobile e-mail for my job. But my company is too cheap to get me a Blackberry. They assume I’m going to be glued to my home computer every weekend to be available for last minute messages. So why not check out this little device that’s gotten such good reviews, and have my own fun with it in addition to filling the work gaps? Freedom!

So, if you’re wondering why a Peek, this is just one person’s story.