One big advantage of having your email go through Gmail is the spam filtering. I don’t know of anything that’s going to do a better job than that, especially for the zero-effort and zero-cost.

I just used Gmail for a complete “intermediary”, by recommendation from a tool-creator, so I thought I’d write it up.

1. Feedbin is a great RSS reader.
2. It has a feature where it gives you an email address and anything that gets emailed to it becomes an entry in your feeds. The intention is email newsletters. I’ve used it for years.
3. Somehow this (secret) email address was leaked, and I started getting spam in my RSS reader (boooo). I can blacklist them from Feedbin, but they were hitting me from random email addresses.
4. I could reset my email in Feedbin, but that wipes out all my subscriptions.
5. I did it anyway, because I was way too sick of the spam. But this time, rather than sign up for newsletters directly with it, I use a brand new Gmail address that auto-forwards to my Feedbin email.
6. Now I can sign up for newsletters with like new-secret-email+specific-newsletter@gmail.com and know that it’ll be forwarded properly, but also that it’s spam-filtered, plus if it leaks again, I can block that particular +-specific email (unique feature of Gmail).

Even if you don’t actually use Gmail directly, passing email through it can be mighty useful.