How to renovate your email to make it better, faster and generally gorgeous.
Following on from Ray’s message about sharing an email account, we have some suggestions for a better way to share email and generally renovate your all important email access.
Ray has found a system that works for him and it’s typical of ‘make do’ systems people have cobbled together for sharing emails. It’s tempting to ‘leave well enough alone’ but there are better ways available these days.
Having two or more email programs grabbing the same email messages via POP will work if, as Ray has done, you set the email clients to retain the messages on the server for some days. However, such a system is liable to problems if one of the computers doesn’t check for mail within the online storage period or the email programs reset the counters on the messages stored online (the latter is the cause of the redownloading of messages).
The POP protocol wasn’t really designed to handle multiple computers accessing the same account. You can make it work, but it’s not very stable.
We suggest a total renovation of the email system, like any renovations there will be some fuss and hassle during the changeover, but once done a modern email setup would be more stable, flexible and able to cope with future changes in technology.
With Ray’s current email setup we see various things that could be improved:
‘Fixed’ email addresses
Using the email addresses supplied by an ISP is a major way to lock you into a single supplier. Far better to ‘own’ your own email address which you can use effectively forever and regardless of how you store your emails.
Using the Internet Service Provider (ISP) to host email
This ties you to a particular ISP and makes it harder to change to a better deal for broadband, TV, phone etc. Of course, that’s why ISP’s offer email hosting, but you don’t have to use it and we strongly suggest NOT doing so. In addition the storage capacity is often too low for modern use.
Effective email synchronization
Move to a system which is designed to handle email access and synchronization from several email accounts. This would save the need to login to computers remotely and let either Ray or his partner access all their email from wherever they are.
Truly personal email addresses
Given how common email is and how important it is to people’s daily lives, we’re amazed how many people stick with ‘tied’ email addresses from their ISP or other email host.
The key idea is to separate your published email address from how that email is stored and managed.
I know that changing email addresses is a hassle but if you switch to an address or domain you own then you’ll never have to change ever again.
It’s simple, easy and quite cheap to buy an email address that’s your forever. You give it out all the time, even when you change your email host or program, the address used by others never changes.
This address might not have email storage attached to it, instead you redirect messages to that address to wherever you’re storing your email.
For example – instead of giving out FredDaggTaihape@gmail.com , Fred has business cards with me@FredDagg.com – messages to that address are setup to forward to Gmail or whatever email host Fred chooses. His email program is setup to show the ‘From’ address as me@FredDagg.com so people he exchanges messages with don’t know how he manages his email.
Gmail is pretty good but net history tells us something better will come along – having an independent email alias/address lets you change hosts much more easily.
There are services that will sell a single email address (aka email alias) and maybe also some email storage. That might be enough for one person, though we’d have concerns about the long term viability of such services. If the company that owns the domain / alias service goes bust or drastically raises their prices, you’re stuck.
For Ray and others who need several email addresses, a more flexible, stable and economic solution is to buy a domain name. Once you own a domain, you can allocate almost any email address/alias in that domain.
You can buy a domain and setup email ‘aliases’ at any time with forwarding to your email host address (on an ISP or elsewhere).
Switch to IMAP
Firstly, we suggest switching from POP access to email accounts to IMAP. IMAP allows synchronization between an email host and several email programs. Each program will see the same messages, including sent items, as are stored on the host.
The problem with this alone is the amount of online storage for email. Most ISP’s have grossly insufficient storage for paying customers, especially when compared to the free services from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
Ray’s email host is an ISP which offers a measly 100MB (ie roughly a tenth of a Gigabyte).
If your email host doesn’t offer enough storage for you – then it’s time to move elsewhere.
For an average email user we’d suggest online storage of at least 1GB per email account – remember this stores all your emails, sent and received plus it’s a good idea to keep past emails as a record of good bought, accounts paid etc.
Switch to a better email host
Assuming that your current email host isn’t offering enough storage – you have to look elsewhere for email storage.
Regular readers will know that we like Google’s Gmail. If offers plenty of storage (over 7GB per account), POP and IMAP access plus a web interface that works both online and offline. The price is hard to beat.
To make the transition easier, Gmail has systems to regularly grab messages from your current email account and put them into Gmail storage. See also Mail Fetcher.
You can use the @gmail.com address or change the Gmail settings to use your preferred email address for outgoing messages. No-one needs to know you’re using Gmail.
All this might sound like a lot of hassle and we can understand many people deciding it’s all too much trouble. However when you consider how important email communications are, we believe it’s worth setting it up right rather than letting outdated systems remain.
At the very least, having a permanent email address or domain gives you a lot more flexibility in the future.
