Dr Shonzilla or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Email (part 2)
In my previous post I wrote what I expect from an email service (i.e. more than I did a year ago :-)) and should probably too.
Email has been around longer than any other service we’ve been using in our online lives. Over time, we only became more demanding.
Email love affair: a recap
Our affair with email begun with just having one. Then we wanted one separate from our ISP. Then everyone got sick of emails promising an early retirement, Nigerian schemes all sorts of unsolicited email (i.e. spam). As anti-spam protection client software didn’t take off in time, we wanted our email provider to protect us. What naturally ensued was a growing email usage by a growing number of people for longer periods of time. The tipping point happened when hard drives prices started to plunge as in the same time email storage became relevant for us, the end users. Some part of the industry recognized the opportunity to offer a few orders of magnitude greater (i.e. gigabytes instead of megabytes) email storage - so they did.
Creating a web-based email account has become so simple that it is hard to find a person under 50 without an email account.
Apart from these basic requirements, I’ve recognized a few more to be increasingly important in post dot-com bubble era. To recap:- Longevity - email address that can become my online ID with time
- Availability - from several places (home, work,
mobilesmart phone, cybercafé,vacation point) - Organization - automagically with tags or folders, easily searchable
- Redundancy - in the case the main email storage is unavailable
Satisfying all these requirements I see as a point of achieving The Email Nirvana.
My personal email history
First off, I need to indulge myself with four paragraphs of my personal email history to suggest you that I know what I’mI’ve been an early adopter of many online services including email. Long before email become a household name, people nerds were hanging out on so-called BBSs (bulletin board systems) which had internal messaging systems (sometimes interconnected with external BBSs). Soon after Internet finally came to Serbia in February 1995, a University account on VAX VMS machine I had back then was also an inbox for receiving electronic messages emails. Granted, apart from colleagues and more tech-savvy professors (not many) I did not have too many people to communicate with back then. Using some email format gymnastics, it became possible to exchange emails with users from my favourite BBS I was a proud member of since 1991. After that, I got a number of university accounts (and corresponding email addresses)… and a blurred memory of using several web-based emails including Hotmail (which sucked even before it was inoperable for 2 months because they forgot to extend passport.com domain registration in October 1999).
At one point, I’ve discovered mail.com which offered email forwarding, allowing me to stop changing email addresses like shoes. As one of the very early adopters of their services, I got a lifetime email forwarding service. :-) Ever since, most of my friends and colleagues still remember the email address I’ve chosen and some refer to me by that email’s username. I tend call this forwarding email address my virtual email address, since I am only forwarding and not storing any emails at mail.com. Some time later, I’ve registered with Yahoo! Mail much before AJAX (and revamped UI when Yahoo! bought Oddpost), with GMail a couple of months after the official launch on April 1 2004. I’ve played with others (Hotmail included for a short period of time), but in hindsight, GMail and Yahoo! Mail (in that order) proved to be the best.
Since I am a roaming person, sometimes slacking at work by checking my private email (just like everyone ;-)), I needed an efficient and comfortable way to access my email from multiple places. Support for IMAP protocol thus became highly desired. Why? IMAP is simply a more powerful protocol compared to much more popular known POP3. Many articles have been written on the subject so I will not repeat what’s been said. With the increased email storage offered by most email providers for free, I am sure IMAP will become mainstream. It is about equally easy to configure and use as POP3, but easier to pronounce and remember, so don’t be scared of another acronym in your life.
Even before GMail and Yahoo! Mail offered email storage that big that it might contain a lifetime of emails, I was searching for an IMAP email provider. After some research and experimenting I’ve settled with a Norwegian Runbox sometime in 2003. Everything was fine and dandy by standards of that time… 1GB of storage and 10MB message limitation was more then enough for chain letters I received from my friends, rarely containing video clips larger than 5MB. Web interface was rather simplistic and was never upgraded to AJAX, which became a headache with a growing number of (IMAP) folders I was using, typically with automatic message filtering.
So enough already! What’s with this Email Nirvana?
The Email Nirvana
OK, here’s how I’ve achived it.
When I got my GMail account, I started using it as a backup account until I got accustomed to using labels to tag my emails. Actually, 95% of my emails are labelled by filters now. A year ago, I’ve decided I will use it once my IMAP subscription expires yesterday. :-) Lucklily, GMail also offered IMAP access, which I’ve tried, used it (for nearly a month) and I believed realized it was far better than what I had before. I’ll leave it to Google to explain how to get started with IMAP.
Longevity
Email longevity I’ve already solved by using my virtual email address. The disadvantage of using a single email address for a long time is that eventually it will leak into spammer’s email databases. At one point I may decide to use it for registering on websites only. What’s good with choosing better email accounts (like GMail and Yahoo! Mail) is that they offer so called disposable email addresses. If you want single sentence explanations - here’s one. A disposable email address is essentially an email account with infinite number of identities (i.e. email addresses) associated with it, where you can use separate identity for separate websites (e.g. you can use for example username+website@gmail.com on www.website.com only). Why is this a good thing? Once you get a spam sent to you via username+website@gmail.com you know who the culprit is ;-) and you can choose to create an email filter for such destination address.
Availability
This requirement was an easy one to fulfill. Today’s email providers allow several ways to access the emails. As email users (i.e. everyone) became more mobile (creating the demand for a more ways to access one’s email), and technologies more powerful (providing ways to implement different access), email providers offered different methods for accessing the emails.
Web-based access allowed us to quickly read our emails and write replies wherever there’s a computer connected to the internet. With email clients we can some regular email activities with greater comfort and speed, and we get greater integration with operating systems email clients are being run on. Also, email client functionality can be extended (this is more true and easier to do with Thunderbird than with Outlook). When deciding on whether to use POP3 vs. IMAP to access emails from an email client, I would always recommend using IMAP (and wrote about it in part 1). GMail offers it for free, while Yahoo! Mail does not. What’s more, Yahoo! Mail requires you to pay for an upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus in order to send emails from your email client (i.e. using SMTP protocol). I found this to be too restrictive, which is yet another reason I now use Yahoo! Mail as email backup by forwarding emails there.
With the ubiquitious dependancy on usage of mobile devices, being able to read your email from anywhere at anytime become a useful feature for some. Most email providers offer a trimmed-down version of their UI (user interfaces) to fit the simpler mobile browsers displayed on small mobile device screens (e.g. GMail Mobile and Yahoo! Mobile Mail. Furthermore, GMail Mobile allows you to read various attachment types (incl. .pdf, .doc). GMail won me for another reason after releasing the GMail for mobile application. It offers a nicer, faster and more robust UI compared to GMail Mobile. It is based on Java which supported by a vast number of mobile devices.
So once I’ve started using GMail as my primary email account and Yahoo! Mail as my secondary/backup account, I have my emails available wherever ago.
Organization
To organize my emails, what I’ve done is to copy all my emails from my previous email account stored at my IMAP email provider. Since I’ve been forwarding my emails to GMail for some time already, I did not need to copy all the emails from my email provider to GMail, just the Sent folder. Then the question came how to copy emails from another email account to GMail account. Initally, I thought this will be a challenge (there were tools for it like GMail Loader), it turned out not to be. In fact, it was simple as nature intended once I’ve tried drag’n’drop from my email client - Mozilla Thunderbird. I’ve tried and the same works with Microsoft Outlook. Of course, I needed accounts in my email client for both my previous email account and one for GMail IMAP account. This exposes all the emails in both email accounts to user-friendly functionality of the powerful email client like the two above. In case you didn’t know already, copying emails from your email client by drag’n’dropping requires you to have something to drag first. That is, you to select (hold Ctrl key and select by mouse clicking) all the emails you want to copy. Then you need to drag them from your previous email account to GMail IMAP account, so this is what I’ve done. I had to copy groups of emails (I’ve chose to move one month worth of emails at a time) as copying to GMail was failing whenever I chose to copy a big set of emails. This is either because they’re still improving the GMail IMAP infrastructure or done intentionally to reduce the load on their servers.
Once I was done with copying emails, all the GMail labels appeared as folders in Thunderbird. Nice!
I haven’t tested copying emails from a POP3 email account to GMail IMAP account using Thunderbird and/or Outlook, but I reckon it should work as well.
When using GMail from Thunderbird or Outlook one can add labels to emails by copying (Ctrl+mouse drag’n’drop) them to a folder representing the label. You can change an email’s label by moving (simple mouse drag’n’drop) the email to the folder representing the new label. By dragging an email outside a folder representing a label, that label will be removed.
I liked how elegantly GMail managed to settle the fight between labels (i.e. tag-oriented organization) and folders (i.e. hierarchical organization). Now I can have the best of both worlds in my favourite email client.
Redundancy
Now I use my virtual email address to forward emails sent to it over to my GMail account. To be redundant, all my emails get forwarded from mail.com to my GMail and my Yahoo! Mail accounts. I do not expect when my urge to find an important email strikes both will be inaccessible. If my internet connection is temporarily unavailable or I forgot to extend my internet subscription at the worst of times, I can still use my mobile phone access. At any point I may decide drop my virtual email address and use my GMail (or Yahoo! Mail) identity everywhere. That’s another flexible layer of redundancy. :-)
Conclusion
By achieving The Email Nirvana, I’ve learned to stop worrying and loved the email. :-)
