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RSSHow to become an e-mail ninja – Part 2
Nov 10
How-To Guides 5 Comments
e-mail, imap, inbox zero, lifehacking, merlin mann, microsoft, mozilla, online life, outlook, pop, productivity, thunderbird
Approximate reading time is 2 minutes
Part 2
Picking up from where we left off last time. If you use POP mail and need to access old messages when you’re away from home, you can’t because it’s all stored inside your home computer!
So, if you need to access your e-mail when you’re not at home, the alternative of web mail would seem to be the solution. However, if you want to have a home copy of your e-mail for back up purposes and for off-line access too, then web mail is no help.
You can’t get web mail if you can’t get on-line.
Although, there is a way around this. You can get a mail account that uses a different protocol, something called “IMAP”, which stands for “Internet message access protocol”, (here’s a list of some free IMAP providers). With IMAP all your mail is on-line, even if you create folders to sort your e-mail into for storage/archiving they are all stored on-line for you to look up from anywhere. However, if you still want your own copy of your e-mail (either for back up or reference), then popular e-mail clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook Express, can download and synchronise your on-line IMAP mail with what you have on your hard drive at home. This is a really useful feature even if you don’t want back-up or off-line access, because you would need to download all of your mail if you ever switched providers. With IMAP, you truly do have the best of both worlds.
If you want to be able to download/upload to/from an IMAP server without messing about with a full e-mail application, then there’s a nice little Windows program called IMAPSize that will do the job of down/up-loading AND incremental backups with a minimum of fuss.
This has the added benefit that if you’re using a mobile device to get your mail on a limited speed (and bandwidth) account, then you can access all of your mail without having to download the whole message (yes I know, this is possible with POP mail, “download headers only”, but it’s more fiddling with settings, whereas in IMAP it’s the norm).
I signed up with Fastmail.fm, which has a free service for you to try out, but is mostly a paid-for service. I like that it is paid for because unlike Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, etc, you’re not wondering what they’re getting out of the deal, since you’re not paying them. It doesn’t cost a great deal at all, less than a night’s beer money for a year of service, bargain! (and no I didn’t get paid to say this).
With Fastmail: I can access my e-mail through my e-mail application of choice (Thunderbird), I can access it all on the web, and they even provide a WAP portal for mobile phones. Every e-mail I’ve ever stored is available to me via my mobile phone. That is really useful if you use your e-mail as a memory dump. Now remember, I have time to fiddle with this stuff, or I wouldn’t be writing this, you just don’t have this sort of time on your hands!
I fiddle so you don’t have to.
How to become an e-mail ninja – Part 1
Make webmail Firefox’s default mail client
How to have your cloud and eat it
Nov 10, 2008 @ 10:39:00
What ho old chap, was wondering what you would pick as the best of both worlds – I was looking for something similiar to this a few months ago (mainly from my dislike web-only-mail services). In the end I plumped out for a MobileMe subscription (for comparison the featureset comes in at about the Enhanced package on fastmail – although with upto 20 Gb rather than 6, although that’s shared between Mail and iDisk) – I ended up using my usual metric of the cost (£59 pa) being worth it after the amount of time spent trying to get a solution exceeded what I was wilingl to spend (time-wise). I’d be interested to know if you have any take on other things that I get from MobileMe (or more specifically if you have any suggestions for free lternatives) – the main other thing I use it for for is the iDisk (essential a webDAV enabled server that automatically syncs a local copy (the latter point being the stumbling block on other solutions I tried). I suspect I can already guess your suggestions for the 3rd reason I have it (syncing of PIM and other application data), anyhow I’m drifting off topic now.
BTW, you might also consider Bariball’s solution (or as many might call it, the nuclear sledgehammer to crack to already scared walnut) – a full blown exchange setup at home
Ryan
Nov 10, 2008 @ 12:30:01
Hello Ryan,
My approach to things is to not put all my eggs in one basket, which is why I would not choose to use MobileMe, Exchange, or Goolge.
As stated, Fastmail handles my e-mail. Then for PIM I used a paid service called Memotoo.com, a free alternative is ScheduleWorld.com. The benefits of both of these is that by using the SyncML protocol, they will interoperate with the majority of phones out there. Then also, they both (Memotoo especially) understand and export to a lot of desktop PIM formats.
As for iDisk, I find JungleDisk (a very secure front-end to Amazon S3) to be an excellent solution.
The advantage of all of these, is that if one of them goes down, I still have the other two services going. Also, all solutions are platform agnostic. Doing it this way gives me maximum freedom. The only disadvantage I have is that my webmail address book isn’t integrated with my PIM address book. It’s rarely an issue though.
Nov 10, 2008 @ 14:19:05
Jungle disk was one of the most promising out the ones I had a play with, however it was not my impression that it provided an automatically (or even) manually synced offline copy (of course a a quick cronjob could quiet easily to it – but I sought one all in).
Memotoo looks interesting (bookmarked for later), they seem to already have iphone sync (albeit only for jb phones) – so might keep an eye on that one.
From time in Hull, I found KC to be weak link in any online based system rather than services going belly up
Ryan