Death to POP/IMAP clients

If you’ve been using personal computers long enough — say, five years — you’re likely to already have lost a hard drive to a crash. To make matters worse, electronic devices have this critical-moment detector that triggers a failure in that device just when you need it most. In my case, the triggers went off just at deadline time. I was lucky the first time because I was able to borrow my brother’s Mac and dash off the article. But I digress.

Any other device that dies — your monitor, modem, printer, even your system board — you can easily replace and the only downtime is the time it takes to replace that device. Not so with the hard drive. You have to restore your OS, your applications, and your data from backup. And if you’re like most users, you have a backup, if at all, only of your data, so you have to reinstall your system and applications software, then set your preferences.

The last hard drive I lost was running FreeBSD, with Evolution as
my POP/IMAP client. When I lost that drive, I lost as well some mail I
wanted to save, mostly personal mail, but also some messages from
mailing lists that had limited archives. Those messages are lost
forever.

That got me to thinking about going purely with
Webmail, and not bothering with a POP/IMAP client. The recent increase
in storage allowances to 100MB of mail services such as Yahoo and
Graffiti.net gave me more reason to go Webmail-only. Then of course,
there’s gmail.

Of course, that was easy for me because I have only one POP account, at Nitrotech – which, incidentally, I handle using Mail2Web. So I’m still Webmail-only! Using Mail2Web, I can scan my incoming messages, then delete those that don’t interest me.

Do
you need a local POP/IMAP client so you can download POP mail and reply
offline? It might take some doing, and you do have to do things in the
right order, but you can use a local POP/IMAP client and store
important messages online, on some Webmail service with a large storage
allowance. And that’s an exercise for the reader

Coming up next, the Webmail services I myself use.