We have severe problems with e-mail at work. We use Outlook 2000. Named not for the year it came out, but for how much mail you can have before Outlook sticks a revolver in its mouth and pulls the trigger. Pass 2000 megabytes of mail, and it’s gone. Corrupted. Without a hope of retrieval, unless you use two Microsoft tools to fix it - the first whacks several megabytes of mail from the end of your monolithic message file, the other heals the wounds THAT caused and makes it usable, until the next time that person passes the limit.
It’s just a little gotcha. Microsoft meant Outlook to be used as the front-end to a Microsoft Exchange server, which keeps your mail safe elsewhere. It was never intended to be used alone (that’s what Outlook Express is for). But they don’t tell you that until it’s too late.
My personal solution was to use the experimental Linux server at work to host my email through IMAP, which keeps it on the server and not on my machine, similar to how Exchange does it. Someday, when I can figure out how to make it safe (scenario: everyone uses the Linux server, loves it, server crashes, entire company loses all their email, I get to play MMOs full time again…) - when I can make it safe, I’ll get everyone on it… but until then…
A web-based email works - available everywhere, works on PCs and Macs. I had tried Yahoo! and Hotmail before and was not impressed. Ugly and slow. I’d heard about GMail, and wondered what that would be like… so I got my GMail-using sister to send me an invite, and redirected all my various personal email accounts toward it.
I’m hooked. Sure, GMail scans my emails and puts targeted ads next to them. Sure, they save all my emails, even the deleted ones, so they can hand them to the government at some point. (But even back in the old ’net of the 80s, everyone expected that the NSA was scanning each and every email and bit of USENET news for keywords. PGP was born of this. Many of us used to put NSA-catchers in our signature files full of keywords like “FBI”, “President”, “NSA”, etc to make them waste time reading pointless crud). Email is sent through the Internet as plain text; anyone can be reading it at any point in its journey.
I have my Linux server at work set up to make a direct connection to the recipient’s email provider, but maybe I’m just being paranoid…
Anyway. I love GMail. Email is grouped into “conversations”, so it is very easy to keep track of threads without having it take up too much space in the list of new emails. And their AJAX interface is as responsive as a desktop app. Totally sold on it. And look how much spam it caught… I pointed the westkarana.com admin email to it, and this account ONLY ever received spam. On the off chance that someone sends a real message there, I can be sure to get it.
Unlike Thunderbird, the program I used before. I had all my email accounts coordinated through that, and it put IMPORTANT STUFF into RANDOM FOLDERS. People I thought never replied to me DID, and I didn’t see those replies until I was setting up my GMail redirectors. I thought they were ignoring me, but it turns out I was ignoring THEM.
That really made me mad.
Grrr.
Another nice thing about GMail is that when someone sends me email through, say, tipa@westkarana.com, when I reply to them, the reply COMES from tipa@westkarana.com, and not my GMail.com address.
In the end, it works a lot better than the weird fetchmail thing I have going at work. And the temptation is VERY strong to just have all my WORK email go through GMail as well, except that GMail hates some kinds of file attachments, but sometimes I just have to send those files.
All in all, positive experience, and if you want a GMail invite, let me know; I have 13 more.
P.S.: tipa.at.aol.com@gmail.com was an available address! Tip of the hat to Gene Wolfe and his “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories”.