[LUGSB] Email management

[Jonathan Brandvein]

So I find myself between email solutions at the moment, and thought I'd ask
here what you guys recommend.

I normally use gmail as my primary account, with a half dozen or so other
addresses forwarded to it. There are two major issues with using gmail:

1) When sending mail, I can specify the address that will appear in the from
field, but still cannot eliminate the @gmail address which also appears
somewhere in the message headers. Maybe that's changed since I last looked,
but I had a bad experience once when "workaphobia at gmail" appeared in a
business message during a summer internship. My solution has been to receive
through gmail and send through whatever webmail interface corresponds to the
address I want to respond from, with the result that my message history is
split across multiple interfaces on independent sites.

2) Apparently, New York State's lawyers have decided that, as a TA, I'm not
supposed to communicate with students about their grades using gmail due to
their policies about data retention and privacy. My response was to decouple
my @ic.sunysb.edu address from my gmail identity and use
webmail.ic.sunysb.edu for most of my correspondence.

I hit a snag this week when I went over my 20MB storage quota on sparky,
with the result that I can't relabel, send, and possibly receive mail. I'd
like to take this opportunity to ween myself off webmail.ic.sunysb.edu's
lousy interface, but I'm not sure what the best alternative is.

I prefer webmail over heavier clients because I want to be able to access
any message from any of my machines. In the past I briefly set up an imap
client on my linux box to work with gmail, but it was a bit laggy. Still,
it's better than using pop and worrying about messages only being available
on the local harddrive of one machine or another.

I think the best method would be an email client on each of my machines with
a means of syncing between them. On windows I'd probably prefer thunderbird,
which I haven't used in ages, and on linux I'd use kmail.

So my questions are: what do you guys do and what do you suggest? Is there
an obvious solution that I'm missing because I've spent so many years
ignoring email clients in favor of webmail?

Thanks,
Jon
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