TransMUG

On the road, at a client’s office, I often use two methods to access my mail: Horde on my web host servers for my personal and professional mail, and GMail for all the mailing lists and other services I subscribe to. After having tried Yahoo! Mail (too limited when it comes to using other accounts in combination), and .Mac Mail–a thing of beauty with, yet again, some frustrating limitations–I came to the conclusion that GMail was the best bet for me. (You won’t catch me using Hotmail…) But first, let’s look at Horde.

Rough but Powerful
Horde is a full-fledge organizer you may only meet when you have a web host. It is generally part of their suite of goodies included in CPanelX, the control panel for the complete management of your site. Having your own private place on the Web is not a luxury anymore. With Hostgator, I enjoy 200GB of storage space, unlimited email address, unlimited domains, on and on… for a measly $9.95 a month. After the terrible experience I endured with Lunarpages, that switch, a year ago, was a great move. And when web domain are under $9 per year at GoDaddy, there shouldn’t be any reason to depend on your ever changing ISP for your email address and basic web page…

Back to Horde: The workhorse is inelegant, but quite powerful, and with tons of messages to sort through and IMAP synchronization of my mail with Apple Mail, it’s nice to have the possibility to run some searches you can save as “Virtual Folders,” Horde’s name for Apple Mail’s Smart ones. Spam filtering there is not tops, though. So I keep that solution for the personal email I only share with friends and clients.

Searches you can save in Virtual Folders with Horde

Catch All… and All
For all my mailing lists and other registrations that can turn bad, I have another domain name I create addresses with that can be disposed of when they are abused. Until this year I had a “catch all” account and it worked great. XYZ Industries wanted my email for their survey and I would write XYZIndustries@mydomain.com, and their correspondence would come to my catch all account. Unfortunately, any spammer creating a random address with my domain name, i.e. random@mydomain.com, would also reach my account. As long as spam filters had to deal with “simple” worms and viruses, all was fine, and my web host spam filter worked fine. Pestmongers have become more refined with time and this solution doesn’t cut it anymore.

GWorld
Enters GMail: I redirect all my catch all accounts to my GMail account and let their spam filter, the best free filter in the business, and let them sift out the crap. I keep my spam on the server for a month, in case I have to search for a message that would have been picked erroneously for the trash. At the end of the first month, GMail had stopped 10,000 messages… Now, 3-months later, the average monthly load has risen to 18,000! You have to wonder how long email services will endure that constant assault. In the meantime, I will soon abandon the “catch all” solution, but the transition is not that simple.

I wasn’t joking…

The only reason why I don’t redirect my own personal email to GMail, is the possibly only shortcoming of the service: it’s not IMAP. In other words, it does not synchronize with my mail client, i.e. if I delete a message in my mail client, it won’t delete it on GMail. Being a POP mail system, GMail offers you to either leave your messages in the Inbox, or remove them.

I find the IMAP alternative very convenient and am keeping that system for my main email account. This way, when I am away from home, when I log into my mail server, the Inbox is the same that the one I have at home, lest the large message archive I keep on my home machine.

Depending on your setup, on your needs, a GMail account may offer a solution to some of your email woes. The private beta phase has ended so you don’t need anybody’s sponsoring you to create your own account anymore. Try it if you haven’t already, you may like it.