I have lots of email accounts. These days it’s almost unavoidable if you want to either have a presence, or protect your username in the various social networks. In no particular order, I have;
jonathan.beckett@gmail.com
jonathan.beckett@live.co.uk
jonathan.beckett@yahoo.co.uk
I expect very soon they will be joined by a Facebook email address too. Total confusion is somewhat mitigated by having everything forward to the Google Mail account, and be automatically filed under appropriate labels. I also operate an attempt at “Inbox Zero” (I archive everything that’s done or read, and star things I need to do).
I’ve been really happy with Google Mail, and allied with the various other services they operate - Calendar, Contacts, Docs, Tasks - they have unwittingly become the “place I do everything”. Their spam filters are pretty spectacular too - but then I guess they are crowd-sourcing a few million people to figure out what spam looks like…
There is a creeping dread though. What if the email account got hacked, and emptied? Also, what about those times (sat on a train, or a far flung hotel room) when I wanted to read and write emails while “offline” ?
In steps Mozilla Thunderbird - an email application from way back - only this one is open source, and has been subject to continual improvement over the years. I installed it last night on my netbook with a couple of aims in mind;
Make a backup of all my email
Allow me to read and write email while offline
Allow me to read, write, file, and archive mail inside the application and have it synchronise what I’m doing with the web (and vice versa).
Synchronise contacts between the application, and my Google Contacts address book.
Thunderbird does all of these things, and more through the magic of IMAP (which it wired up all by itself), and a couple of free plugins - one handling contact synchronisation, and the other the calendars.
By the end of last night (or rather the early hours of this morning) the first grab of my email was nearly complete - all 28,000 messages. I keep everything. There’s a certain comfort to be had in knowing that I have a copy of everything Google has. If disaster strikes tomorrow, I haven’t lost it all…