[Leica] Tina and her pesky email clients

[jbm at jbm.org (Jeff Moore)]

[eavesdropping on private traffic sent via the LUG]

2010-01-10-16:35:40 Tina Manley:
> This is complicated by the fact that my Eudora  
> has suddenly started to drop most messages so I'm trying to switch to  
> Thunderbird and, so far, cannot figure out where it is putting my  
> incoming messages!

I have a suggestion which may seem a little out-of-the-box, but which
may actually be a practical solution:  have you considered gmail?

Sure, you may primarily think of gmail as a place to get Yet Another
Email Address, this time <something>@gmail.com, and that can be useful
too, but...  once you have a gmail account (free!) you can set it up
to poll your other email accounts (up to five, I think, but that bears
researching) and import email sent to them into gmail, for access via
gmail's (in my opinion) excellent web interface.  You can have mail
from all the accounts appear identically in your inbox, or have all
the sources tagged and filed for you to look at separately.  Once you
understand gmail's model, which may take some getting used to but
actually makes excellent sense, finding things which got filed away
tends to be remarkably easy.

Here's the model: instead of sticking things into folders (and one
problem with folders is that usually if you stick something in one
folder it can't be in another, unless you make another copy of it), in
gmail there are only two places a message can be: in the inbox, or
archived.  But you can add tags of your choice to messages, then
archive them, and (hint) the tags would be the same sorts of names
you'd have been using for folders;  and tagged messages are instantly
accessible, just like looking in a folder.  But you can have more than
one tag on a message, if that happens to be convenient.  Or you don't
have to tag at all, because the archived-message search capabilities
make finding particular old messages remarkably easy.

As for importing your other email sources: you can tell gmail to do it
either just importing the new stuff and also leaving a copy in the
source, or importing and then deleting from the source.  You may wish
to do the former until you trust the setup, then go for the latter.

The things you need to decide about before going this way are:

  - Do you trust Google with the information in your email?  So far,
    for the most part I think I do, but this is something you need to
    decide for yourself.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil

  - Do you trust Google not to lose your email?  Their record seems
    pretty good, probably well better than the average for home users
    and their disks, but I see nothing wrong with covering your bets by
    periodically pulling a copy of whatever's there to your own storage
    as well as a backup; there are articles on this for the various OS
    flavors out on the web.

  - Do you expect to have web access whenever you need to look through
    your email?  This approach doesn't work if you don't.  (Note that
    Google are working on Google-Gears-based offline gmail access, but
    I'm not sure you can count on it yet.)


The advantages I see to using gmail in this way to aggregate and index
your mail are:

  - You get that great indexing (as mentioned before)

  - You get a good (and continually improving) web-based interface,
    which frees you to access your email from wherever you are, on any
    of a number of computers, rather than having to use whatever machine
    you had set up with your email client and archives.

  - More on the above: you don't run into that terribly annoying
    archive-merging problem you get if you pull some mail to one
    computer and other mail to another.

  - Once you've got your email handling moved into "the cloud", it
    removes one of the more annoying hurdles you'd encounter if you
    wanted to migrate to a new machine (whether it be finally a lovely
    new Mac, or just another faster nasty Windows box).

  - If you should ever decide to get one of the new Android-based
    phones (the Droid from Verizon, the Nexus One straight from
    Google, the original T-Mobile G1, several others with ranks
    expanding), using gmail and your Google-based address book and
    calendaring on your phone is built right in, seamless and
    painless.

  - For people other than Tina, people whose primary email address is
    provided by their internet connectivity provider (for example,
    <you>@comcast.net, <you>@verizon.net and the like -- you know who
    you are), I strongly recommend migrating to a separate email address
    unrelated to your internet service provider, and taking the time to get
    all your frequent contacts weaned off using your ISP-based
    address.  Why?  Because you should be treating your service
    provider simply as a commodity provider of bandwidth, and be able
    whenever you see a better (faster, cheaper, more reliable) deal on
    internet plumbing to switch to a different pipe.  Getting you to
    count on their provided email address is one of the ways the ISPs
    set up a barrier to easy switching, keep you locked in.

    And for this ISP-neutral email address, gmail seems a fine option
    at this time.

Something to think about.

I'd be glad to talk you through setting up account importing and
message filtering rules if you'd like (although I bet there are
several here who know at least as much about this as I).

 -Jeff