Thinking about moving my email into the ‘cloud’
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 10:07pm
Despite what I have said in the past, my mind is gradually changing in regard to moving my email up into Gmail instead of hosting it myself on my home linux box.
What has changed?
Since my previous comments I have played around a bit more with Gmail (in no small part due to work) and I am starting to think that the conversation and label model might work better for me.
Currently I file both messages I receive and messages I send (for some topics) in the same folder. The benefit is that I can then see all messages in the thread in one place. While a downside is that there is no longer a copy in my sent folder. Conversations give me the benefit, without that downside.
Another advantage is that messages can be labelled and still be in my inbox. So I can choose to still have some mailing lists appear in my inbox, but once I have read it I will archive instead of delete. The message will then only appear under the label (and all mail.)
Currently I need to either rememer to check the folder for that list, or once I have read the message I need to move it to the correct folder. I have found both approaches to be problematic.
But Gmail is not without it’s disadvantages.
The primary copy of my mail will now be in the cloud (again shown to have it’s problems) so I need to make sure that I have an automated backup (offlineimap run from cron should suit) and I will need an Internet connection to access my mail (also needed everywhere except home)
The bulk of my investigations have been into how well the labels and conversations work with IMAP. I have found that if a single message of a conversation has a label, the web interface makes it appear as if the conversation has the label. But over IMAP only the message with the label is in the folder. So to get the most advantage of labels I would need to use the web interface.
My next concern is how I manage forwards/nicknames/aliases as I currently have a single mailbox, but over 200 forwards. Almost everytime something needs an email address I will create a new forward. This makes it very clear who leaked/sold my email address to a spammer. If I were to use Google Apps, it appears that there is a limit of 30 nicknames per mailbox. Not early enough. Although it won’t be as convenient, I could continue to manage the forwards my domain host.
I think that I am at the stage where I will give it a try by redirecting my mail and I won’t move all of my existing mail over until I am satisfied. This should also give me an idea of what mail functionality I actually need on my iPhone.
