After a couple years of manually recording rainfall out here in the desert I've picked up a cheap internet connected weatherstation from Jaycar (Digitech XC0440). It pushes updates to WeatherUnderground https://bit.ly/3O0GJNV and Weathercloud https://bit.ly/48UCewn so data is automatically and meaningfully collated over time. And I never have to empty the rain guage - it just falls straight through