[FoRK] trapped in gmail [was Re: whoa - gmail is deciding on what kinds of attachments you can send now]

[Kent Spaulding]

I use imap-partners.net (somewhate related to FoRK) for IMAP, Apple  
Mail is the client.

I have a server-side rule the fwds all email to my gmail account when  
it is received.

gmail is the free backing store, and I have access to its mobile  
interfaces, etc.

On May 25, 2009, at 10:54 AM, Luis Villa wrote:

> On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 1:11 PM, Ian Andrew Bell <hello at ianbell.com>  
> wrote:
>> Gmail is for weenies.   Tuffmail FTW.
>>
>> http://www.ianbell.com/2009/05/23/tuffmail-still-the-best-imap-service-provider-i-can-find/
>
> So, I admit I'd like to move off gmail to a reliable standards-based
> mail service, and tuffmail sounds pretty good. And I've taken a number
> of reasonable steps to avoid dependency on gmail's servers (I use
> @tieguy.org, for example, rather than @gmail.com.)
>
> But despite not being hooked on gmail's servers, I'm hooked on gmail's
> clients. If I could point those clients at another IMAP server, I'd do
> it in a heartbeat. The features that keep me hooked:
>
> * conversation view (inc. integration of inbox/outbox): I don't
> understand how every other mail client on earth has not adopted this,
> or at least doesn't offer it as an option. The only thing I've seen
> that does this on a terminal (http://sup.rubyforge.org/) is brutally
> unusable with IMAP, AFAICT.
>
> * excellent addressbook integration: some email clients now handle
> adding to their own addressbook roughly correctly, but good luck
> getting that to work across multiple clients, even if you're willing
> to host and configure your own LDAP server (which I'd really prefer
> not to.)
>
> * excellent mobile clients: related to the first two points, even if I
> could find a desktop or alternative web client that did those things
> well, it would be asstastic on my phone. And those two are just the
> things that are poorly handled by most desktop clients- the list of
> things poorly handled by most mobile clients is much, much longer
> (e.g., search.)
>
> There are other things I would miss but could probably fake up (e.g.,
> sending my IM logs to my email server so that they were all indexed in
> one place.)
>
> Or to put it another way: my mail is now siloed, and I hate silos, but
> this is a silo that seems to have a deep dedication to giving me
> sophisticated, integrated access on every operating system and device
> I can think of. And I'm now sort of hooked on that :/
>
> Am I crazy? are there solutions out there for all this that I've  
> missed?
>
> One possible solution that came up during the course of writing this
> email is that I could use tuffmail as a front end and use gmail to
> pull it via POP; I'd lose some functionality but I'd at least have a
> backup of all my inbound mail. Still, that seems very suboptimal.
>
> Luis
>
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