Email is my most important means of communication. My favourite is face-to-face; second to that, the telephone, followed by IM. I think I might even prefer the intimacy of a hand-written letter to most cold, unfeeling, poorly-punctuated, hastely-posted email.

But email really is the most important. It’s instant, convenient, concise, and reliable. Well, mostly reliable, as we’ll see.

Friends and family talk about personal matters; random people ask me CSS questions; I get stuff from classmates about whatever; and I’m on mailing lists for things like the WCF Exec.

So I was understandably upset to discover—a few weeks ago—that some unknown percentage of my outgoing mail was simply not getting through.

Not all of it was failing, of course, just some. It didn’t matter if it was from SquirrelMail or Thunderbird, each individual message had about a 40% chance of disappearing.

No bounce, no notice, no warning, just gone… swallowed up in the depths of the intarweb.

Tech Support

The otherwise excellent folks at Dreamhost could find nothing wrong. And yet, even messages to their own support account were failing to arrive!

What could I do?

Gmail Envy

When Gmail launched, I proudly declared that I didn’t care. Hotmail was good enough, I felt. Changing email addresses is a big hassle. (Making switching difficult is a viable, if temporary, way of keeping customers)

Really though, it was a lie. For almost two years, I’ve had my nose up against the window, wishing my webmail was as sexy as Gmail.

Webmail is important. Of all the emails I composed over the past year, probably a third or more were at school or work or someone’s house: places where my only option was to use Squirrel.

Gmail doesn’t just beat Squirrel, it actually trounces Thunderbird and Outlook, too. How embarassing is that, a webapp that has the server support to be more responsive and user-friendly than its desktop brethren?

Labels, starring, searchable archive, properly threaded conversations, instant response. I don’t know a lot about the IMAP protocol, but couldn’t Thunderbird at least make some effort to maintain an offline keyword index for speedy fulltext searches?

Too late

So already, I was annoyed that my paid email experience (both on the web and desktop) was playing second fiddle to what Google gives away for free. And then there was the little issue of the disappearing emails. Which, on various occasions may or may not have made me appear aloof, uncaring, disinterested, and unappreciative.

The nail in the coffin was discovering that Gmail will actually send a message “from” whatever address you like, as long as you verify that you control it. So even though my address has always been and will remain mike at uwmike dot com, it’s simply forwarding to Gmail, and then Gmail is sending outgoing messages apparently from it.

Sidebar: What this means in terms of archive is that every incoming message is stored twice; on my server and on Google’s. However, each outgoing message is stored only with google. Of course, if this was really a big concern, it would be trivial to make a Greasemonkey script (or something) to BCC every outgoing message back to myself…

Confidence

Gmail has me completely converted. They know their product is the best, and that’s why they allow me to use it without lock-in. They’re content that my eyeballs are viewing their adwords; they don’t also require every outgoing message to be a blazing advertisement for themselves.

And ain’t that the irony? They were so good at being invisible that I just had to tell you all what a great thing it is!

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 4:57 pm to Website.