Recently in E-mail Category

More than a few institutions of higher learning (including California State University Northridge, I've learned) are in the process of transitioning from traditional e-mail services (generally Web-delivered, I believe) to Google Apps, through which students and faculty will have e-mail and documents managed by Google (thus either freeing university IT staff to "work on other things," which could mean "other things," or "you're fired"; unsure on that one).

Anyhow, it's no secret that I'm a proponent and occasional user of Google Apps (more Sites, some Docs and Mail), and the city of Los Angeles' exploration of Apps for its use has put the spotlight even more tightly on Google and its response to and resolution of problems.

So Brown University is among the schools moving to Google Apps, and recently some students discovered that through Gmail they were able to read hundreds of messages in other students' e-mail boxes.

Not terribly secure. It turns out that 22 students were able to read others' e-mail, but there has been some criticism aimed at Google for a) taking 3 days to resolve the problem and b) not communicating well (or pretty much at all) with the university's IT department after the problem was discovered.

"It was a small hiccup along the way and it's an issue we've taken extremely seriously," Google's Rajan Sheth told The New York Times. (And you know when The New York Times gets involved, there's considerable heat on your ass).

What I'll say is that these things happen, and Google should be getting better at having them not happen. I don't know how they're doing on that. I suspect we'll either hear more (especially if things don't go well at CSUN) or hear less (if things do go well).

And as I, along with scores of others, have written recently, Microsoft's own cloud-based apps are starting to roll out, although it'll be awhile before they work at all (the Word component is still read-only) and probably a longer while before they are as well integrated with each other and with a matching e-mail component, and also a long time (or even never) before documents are as easily shared and collaborated on as they are in Google Apps.

You never know, especially at this early stage. One thing I do hope is that a) Google learns from all these glitches and smooths out these transitions, and b) the competition from Microsoft pushes Google to upgrade Apps that much more quickly and start adding the missing functionality (like easily created paragraph indents and "smart" quotes) that would make using Docs more like a true MS Word-type application and less like a souped-up, HTML- and CSS-powered text editor.

I've been accessing my main e-mail account via IMAP for years now. With IMAP, the mail stays on the server, and the mail client brings down the headers and then any messages necessary. That way I can go anywhere, use any computer and have access to that mail with another mail program, or use the same mail server's Web interface to check up on my latest messages.

My main mail client (or I could just say "program," like I did in the last paragraph to make it simpler) is Thunderbird. I can't say I'm deliriously happy with Thunderbird. One reason I use it is that it's available for Windows and Unix/Linux, so I can use it in any of the hundreds of GNU/Linux distributions, in any BSD system, on my Windows box at work, and even on Mac OS if I felt like it (I don't).

Anyhow, I'm not feeling so good lately about leaving my mail on the server. I generally filter quite a bit of it (Thunderbird is great with filters, by the way) down to the local drive anyway, and now I want all of my mail off of a server I don't control and onto a system (or systems) I do control.

Hence POP, or Post Office Protocol, which reigned supreme in the pre-broadband days when people didn't stay connected to their mail server all the time. Back in the day, a user would dial up with a telephone modem, grab their mail with POP, have any mail they composed offline sent, and then read new mail at their leisure, connecting again later to send additional messages.

I just POP-ped down (is it really POP-ped?) a few thousand messages, and for now I'll just say that moving a complicated heap of mail in folders down via POP is messy and nearly undoable. And the mail server in question, at any rate, isn't happy about mass downloads of mail all at once to the local drive.

I lost more than a few messages, I think (it's hard to tell), but I'm glad to have all of that mail off the server.

Meanwhile, I've been using Thunderbird heavily in OpenBSD 4.4, and whether due to the OS or the app, the mail client is running way better here than in Windows. Everything is happening very quickly with no glitches.

Truth time: All of this gives me a very warm feeling about the Web-based e-mail services I also use every day: Yahoo Mail and Google's Gmail. Both of these have given me way less trouble than IMAP, POP and traditional mail clients ever have. (And for the moment I'll forgive Yahoo for the problems I'm having with their "new" mail interface and Google's Chrome browser ... can't compose an e-mail that way; I hope they're working on it.)