E-mail: October 2007 Archives

There's the way to stick it to Yahoo.

Google surprised me by slowly rolling out the IMAP e-mail protocol for users of its Gmail service. Since Web-based e-mail clients are basically front-ends for IMAP-style e-mail access, it only makes sense to allow users of your Web e-mail portal to check their mail from ... any mail client they wish without resorting to the use of the POP protocol, which downloads all the mail to the hard drive of the computer on which you are using the stand-alone mail client.

Back in the days of dialup and small amounts of disk space, POP made sense -- you didn't want your phone line tied up, and you were always hitting your storage limit, so POP-ing your mail down to your own PC made sense.

But now, with always-on broadband, free mailboxes offering 2 GB and more of space, and with just about everybody needing to read their mail on multiple PCs (I use between three and six in any given week), the iPhone, Palm handhelds (including Treos) and more, IMAP -- in which mail stays on the server and can be accessed by multiple apps on multiple devices at multiple times -- is the only way to go.

Since Yahoo Mail charges for POP service and doesn't even offer IMAP, Google's move to IMAP (they already have free POP access) cements them as the go-to free mail provider.

So if you already use Outlook (or Thunderbird, Evolution, Sylpheed or what have you), once you go IMAP, you never go back.

Update: My Gmail account does not currently have IMAP capability.

Another contender: AOL -- remember them? -- offers both POP and IMAP access to its free mail service. And if you have an AIM account, you're already signed up. Along with the best-in-class Xdrive online storage service, it makes AOL more of a contender than you might realize.

I don't use my DSL Extreme e-mail all that often. Even though the mail service is part of my ISP service -- and I've been with DSL Extreme since before I even had DSL (they still offer dialup) -- I've hesitated using it because I want to have an e-mail address that I can keep forever.

But what is "forever" in the online world? And does it matter?

And now that I discovered that DSL Extreme's e-mail Web portal uses a secure connection all the time -- not just during login -- I'm thinking about using it more.

Couple that with the fact that DSL Extreme offers, in addition to Web-based access, both IMAP and POP service, and it gets even better.

But for me, the main selling point is the secure connection.

My company's e-mail is not secure. Neither the login nor the mail itself is on a secure server. Now we're not dealing with national security here, but why not use a secure server if its available.

I just feel better about it.

Even though Yahoo Mail is my "main" account, I haven't been checking it all that often. I've been using my Daily News e-mail for business correspondence, but the lack of security -- and the fact that I don't want to use it for personal e-mail -- is a drawback.

I've always had good luck with DSL Extreme e-mail when it comes to configuring mail clients (including Mutt and MSMTP on the Linux console), so it just might be time to start using it more.

At least I'm thinking about it.