[LUGSB] Email management

[James Crasta]

Jonathan Brandvein wrote:
> 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?

Here's one client-based solution you may not have considered: IMAP.
It's a protocol which allows reading your email using a mail client,
but the messages and folders are stored on the server.   Since gmail
supports IMAP now, you can configure Thunderbird to read all your mail
(except for the sparky mail) from their IMAP server.   This will not
download the mail to the local machine, and archiving/deleting from
the gmail webmail won't force you to re-read it in your mail client,
since what you see in the client is "synched" to what you would see in
the webmail.  Similarly if you delete from the IMAP client and logon
to the gmail web interface, you won't see the same email again.

Then, you configure all your other email outgoing accounts (for which
you can do so) in thunderbird to use SMTP to send mail out.  This way
you get the ability to send mail with the proper from address and
headers indicating it came from the correct ISP's server.

For the case of your sparky mail, I'd set it up with thunderbird to do
IMAP as well, but on your home machine I'd keep a local email archive
where you drag your messages from sparky to the archive if you want to
keep them.  Otherwise; keep the sparky IMAP mailbox clean so you don't
run into space issues.

Me personally I used the setup I described above for years, with most
of my email going into a single IMAP mailbox (since I did not have any
privacy issues preventing me doing so) but recently I've just been
using the gmail webmail interface so much that I hardly open
thunderbird.  It is nice knowing that if I want to though, I can still
use it.

I might mention that the caveat of IMAP is that you have limited
options for reading the mail offline; but if you use webmail most of
the time I imagine this is hardly an issue.

James