I am a long time desktop email client advocate. I have been using Thunderbird since nearly the day it came out. I believe I started using it around version 0.3 which came out in late 2003. I could see the potential and it has grown into a great application.
My original reason for choosing the app was for great IMAP support. This email protocol is one of the best, it allows you to keep all of your email on your remote server and it looks the same everywhere. Thunderbird is the only real great IMAP client out there that is not a terminal application.
I’ve been slowly thinking about making the switch to a web based application, I tried to find a good client to run on my own server. The only decent looking project I could find was RoundCube. This solution might work for some people, but on my locked down server it just wont work. The mod_security rules I have in place blocked the script from running. This pretty much stopped me in my tracks. If it does something that my rules block I really do not want to run the software on my server.
At that point it was fine just to stick with Thunderbird. Finally last week I see in my RSS feeds that the only two paid developers on Thunderbird are no longer working for Mozilla. This was the point I knew for sure I needed to find something better. The project will still be around, but I now have no security in the projects future.
It was time to choose a web based email client. For me the only logical choice is gmail; hotmail is, well hotmail and Yahoo mail looked tempting, but just did not suit my needs. The real feature that won my over was search. As I have stated in the past I do not use bookmarks I use google instead. The gmail philosophy is perfect for me.
Now for the fun part, trying to import all of my email into gmail. Like most people I have quite a bit of email that I want to keep for reference purposes. Importing all of my normal email into gmail was fairly easy, I just created a new email account on my own server and put all of the emails in it. Then I used the POP3 access in gmail to import the messages. I did this folder by folder so I could tag all of the messages correctly.
The next part is where I spent hours, importing the sent mail. I had over 700 emails I wanted to import and no clear way to do it easily. A google search led to Google GMail Loader (GML). This little tool should send all of the emails to your gmail account and either put them in your inbox or sent items. I made this mistake of starting out using the Windows version of the tool. I would start the import process and the application would freeze up. The only way I could fix the issue was to end the process. I spent about an hour trying to get the program to play nicely with me without luck.
I then searched around for another tool to do the same thing. Everything I could find led me back to the same place. I finally decided to wait until I could get on a *NIX machine to use that version of the program.
After taking a break and switching over to OS X it was time to try again. This version of the tool requires some dependancies that I had some issues resolving, that was until I found a great tutorial on the subject. I still had some error come up saying that a cnf file was missing, but I found it in the install directory and placed it in the location it asked for. It was then time to test out the application. I filled out the information just as I had done on the Windows side, but this time I had the terminal window to show me output. The application still froze up when it was working, but I could see exactly what it was doing by keeping an eye on the terminal.
Time to figure out how to do email forwarding to gmail. For this domain, zacgarrett.com I’ve only ever used a forwarder in the past to my other account. Simple fix, just forward the email to gmail instead. For my primary email I decided to use the gmail pop service. This will allow me to save an email on my external server for the time being so that if I decide to switch back it will not be all that painful.
I did find out that gmail now offers to send your email from another email address. You have to verify that this is your email, but I was able to setup several different aliases for my different emailing purposes. Quite simple and a very nice feature for converts like myself. I want my email to come from my own URL. Gmail does not look that bad to most people today, but I prefer my own domain.
So far I am happy with gmail. I installed gmail notifier on my primary machines and it allows me to keep track of the emails coming in. It actually does this better than Thunderbird on OS X. On the Windows side of things they are about equal in my eyes, both popup with the subject and brief description.
I do not see myself switching back to a client based email client for my own email at this point in time. I still have to keep the client around for work related email, but it is nice to get my personal email out of there. Time will tell how much I like using this service.
