As a road warrior, I rely heavily on email.  I use it to keep in touch with friends and family as well as to get work done.  But I still can’t find the perfect email solution.

I love Gmail.  Unabashedly.  I admit it.  I think it is one of the greatest online apps ever to come about, the one that everyone else is copying.  It is intuitive, easy to use, has great spam filtering (thank God), and can be accessed from anywhere.  Well, almost anywhere.

The 2GB of storage is what I love most about Gmail.  It’s free, too.  But as a packrat that saves nearly everything, I find that 2GB that is accessible almost anywhere is a godsend.  And the quick searches make it perfect for finding things in a flash.

But alas, many companies are now blocking access to Gmail with their proxies.  I guess they feel that any email other than the company’s own email can be used for evil.  However, recent court rulings have upheld that the company that owns the email server owns the email, which means they can do whatever they please with it.  Well, as a consultant, I perform many tasks via email that are truly not any of the client’s business (expenses, lodging, gripes, etc.).  So, I don’t want to use the client’s email server for such matters.

So, what am I to do?  How do I get the benefits of Gmail in an email service that is accessible.  Let’s go through what I am currently doing, and why, and see if there are any additional benefits that can be gained.

Obviously, company proxies can’t block every email website that exists.  But they get the big ones: Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, etc.  But I figured the safest bet on getting around the proxy is to run an email server on my own machines at home.  This isn’t as easy as it may seem.

Windows XP pro come with Internet Information Services (IIS) which makes all the Unix guys cringe.  But it’s passable for some things.  IIS has an SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) server which can be activated and used, but it only relays mail.  It doesn’t store it or make it available to email clients.  I need a POP (Post Office Protocol) or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) server.

Enter my cellphone.  I want to be able to get email on my cellphone, if for no other reason than to know when I have received a message.  Ideally, I would like to be able to read the message, and if I can’t get to a computer right away I also want to be able to respond.  Obviously, I am not going to be writing any long emails on my cellphone, but it would be nice to be able to send short responses in a pinch.

My current cellphone is the T-Mobile MDA, which is a Windows Mobile PocketPC with phone capabilities.  It isn’t the greatest phone, but it is a capable PocketPC.

Another nice thing I wanted to be able to do is to file emails away once I’ve read them.  That’s easy in Gmail, just archive it.  But on a cellphone, that’s not so easy.  Enter IMAP.

IMAP and POP are both email protocols, but there are differences.  POP will allow an email client to retrieve emails from a server, but if you use multiple clients, the server can get confused.  And it is pretty much impossible to gather emails into one central location for ratpacking with multiple clients.  POP is pretty underpowered.

IMAP, on the other hand, is like a webmail service (like Gmail) in that the emails remain on the server and anything any client does to the emails is done on the server.  So, for example, say I create a new folder and move an email to it.  When I sign on with another email client, that new folder automatically appears and the moved email is shown to be in it.  Finally!  Something I can get behind.  But where can I find an email service that uses IMAP?

There is a wonderful email service called Fastmail.  Fastmail is an email service, like Gmail, that also offers IMAP support on their premium accounts.  Wonderful!  But the storage isn’t as much as Gmail unless you pony up some dough.  So I got back to the idea of running a server at home.  Plus, Fastmail is blocked at the client site.

Running a server at home can be educational and even a little fun, but IMAP isn’t free.  Well, check that, it is possible to run an IMAP server on a Linux machine, which I tried, but there weren’t many easily-obtained extras, like web access.  Sure, it’s all there, but it takes a lot of time and research to set up properly and I simply didn’t have a lot of time to put toward this.  Especially when it comes to email; it needs to be up and working and I simply can’t afford to take weeks to work all the bugs out.

Enter Ability Mail Server from Code Crafters.  Sure, it cost me some dough, but it’s a wonderful bit of software that runs in the background on my main XP machine.  Therefore, I didn’t have to dedicate an entire box to Linux, which is a plus (my current Linux box is belly-up and I haven’t had the time to diagnose and fix it).

Bingo!  Suddenly I had an email server at home that I could configure to my heart’s content.  I could store as much email as I wanted (it seems to limit me to 2GB, but that’s plenty), it has a web front-end (which isn’t blocked by the proxy), and it’s easily configurable.  But there are still a few shortcomings.

As I said, I love Gmail.  So, how do I use Gmail sometimes and Ability Mail other times?  So far, this has eluded me.  It is easy to forward my Gmail to my Ability Mail server since that ability is built into Gmail.  But now I have 2 emails to deal with.  When I am using Gmail, each incoming email sits unattended in Ability Mail, and vice-versa.  How can I stay on top of all this?

Well, Gmail has a Java client for smartphones and the like.  But it’s horrible.  The usability is very low, so I rarely use it.

Furthermore, how can I set up my cellphone to get “push” email?  Push email is the brainchild of the Blackberry people.  When an email arrives in your inbox, a signal is sent to your Blackberry that it’s there, so there’s minimal delay.  But you have to route the email through the Blackberry servers.

Windows Mobile devices, however, now have the ability to do push email, but it has to be on an Exchange server, and also is limited to only one such server.  You can’t have multiple push accounts on a single Windows Mobile device.

So, I checked out Web2Mail.com.  I used to use Web2Mail.com (blocked at the client site) as an internet-based email client.  It was great in its day, and seems to have made many improvements.  They even offer Exchange-based email service for premium customers.  But again, free storage is limited.

I am not sure how much Microsoft charges for Exchange, but I am reasonably certain that I won’t be running an Exchange server at home any time soon.

So, here’s my perfect world: Gmail needs to add IMAP access.  They already have POP access, so why not IMAP?

I believe I know the reasons.  Gmail doesn’t use folders.  You can tag emails to make them easier to find, and emails can have multiple tags.  So, how can that fit into the folder paradigm of IMAP?  I guess they could limit emails to a single tag when done so via IMAP, and then write software to bridge the ideologies.  In other words, a tag on an email equates to it being in that folder.  If an email has multiple tags, then in appears in multiple folders.  I guess copying an email to a folder could be a form of adding a tag, but the IMAP client on my phone only has “Move” and no “Copy.”  But still, limiting to one tag when accessing via IMAP would be perfectly acceptible.

So, here I am.  I am maintaining two separate email accounts that both get the same emails.  Another shortcoming of this method is that mail sent from one won’t appear in the other.  I could copy myself, but that gets sent back to the original server.  So, for instance, if I reply to an email from the Ability Server and copy myself to get that email into Gmail, Gmail then forwards that mail back to the Ability Server.  Now I have 2 copies of it.

Okay, I know this has gone a hundred directions all at once, which adequately illustrates the issues involved with email in today’s world.  Does anyone know of anything that might tame this beast?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 9:01 am and is filed under Email, Microsoft, Software.