[LUGSB] Email management

[Benjamin Kudria]

Welcome to the list, Jonathan!

On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 15:54, Jonathan Brandvein <workaphobia at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

If you still want to continue using GMail, There is Google Apps
(formerly ...For Your Domain) which allows you to use a domain you own
with GMail, and their other apps.  Of course, Google still receives,
processes and delivers your email, just with your name on it.  It
still originates on their servers, however.

The free version of this has been increasingly difficult to locate
from Google's site, the direct link is here:
http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new

You can buy a domain from Google, apparently, or from anyone else.
The setup is a bit tricky if you're not familiar (setting DNS MX
entries), but I can help you through it, since this is what I use.

> 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.

In this case, I *highly* recommend the folks at http://fastmail.fm
They have an amazingly well run operation.  Their tech guys are solid
(they regularly submit patches to Courier, the mail server they use,
and I've never had a technical problem with their service. Their
webmail client is fast and excellent, and they have tons of features.
Their service has several pay levels.  The free account inserts ads at
the end of your email, but for a one-time 15$ fee, they'll remove
those and give you more space, bandwidth, etc.

They own a bunch of domains, so you can choose which address you'd
like.  They do the DNS trick that lets you use your own domain as
well, but only on the Full plan, one up from the one-time 15$ Member
plan.  The Full plan costs 20$ per year.

In my opinion, if you never want to worry about email again, and can't
use GMail for some reason, these guys are a very solid bet.  The full
comparison for their plans is here:
http://fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricingtbl.html

I use GMail (through Google Apps) because I like the client a lot, and
because of third-party support.  Otherwise, I'd pay these guys.

> 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.

Yes, definitely use IMAP in preference to POP.

> 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.

IMAP would handle all the syncing issues, but KMail has terrible IMAP
support.  It might have improved recently, but in the KDE 3.5.6ish
days, it really was quite broken.  Thunderbird I believe is a mature
client on both platforms.

Let us know what you decide!

Ben Kudria
-- 
http://ben.kudria.net | Jabber: ben at kudria.net