Mail applications vs. Web mail

For some reason, testing and using Linux got me interested in trying to read and manage my e-mail with traditional mail clients, even though it was contrary to my experience, habit and nature. From almost the first time I had access to Internet e-mail, I've sent and received it via an online interface, going all the way back to AOL. (That doesn't count the Los Angeles Valley College-based BBS I used in the early '90s that offered free Internet mail that I could download with Usenet news as QWK packets and read and write offline with a shareware DOS program whose name totally escapes me.)

For my personal mail, I've tried quite a few services, but Yahoo keeps upping the ante as Gmail and others nip at its heels -- and Yahoo has kept me with such seemingly benign announcements as "more storage!" "dots in your e-mail address!" "unlimited storage!"

To keep my geek cred, I do have an account on Gmail (especially since I used to be a heavy user of Blogger.com and Google Groups, which now either require or strongly suggest you have a Google account, the "benefits" of which include a Gmail address). I've never used Gmail much, not because it's better, worse or different than Yahoo Mail, but just because everybody knows my Yahoo address, and that's what I use.

Gmail does offer free POP mail service, meaning it can be used with a traditional mail client, and Yahoo offers POP access for a fee (well worth it if you need to use a mail program), but since I'm at different computers during the day and week, managing e-mail that's not on a central server just doesn't work for me -- I need it all to be in one place, accessible anywhere, at any time.

That's what made IMAP service -- where mail stays on a Internet-accessible server -- so intriguing to me when I started to experiment with Linux. But even the Daily News doesn't offer IMAP. And while Web-based e-mail clients basically deal with mail over an IMAP server, neither Yahoo nor Google offer it. It's ironic. But not helpful

So I configured SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, Evolution, and more recently Sylpheed and Mutt, to receive my POP mail from Yahoo and the Daily News' e-mail system. But downloading all my mail to one computer, as I said, doesn't work for me. And while all e-mail clients allow you to tell the mail server to keep the mail when download it via POP, there's no way to "manage" that mail via the client software -- I can't get rid of the messages until I go to the paper's Web-based client, so it's just better for me to do all my e-mail from the Web, even if our Web mail site is slow as molasses much of the time.

Even with IMAP, you have more "portability." But who wants to set up a dozen different programs on a half-dozen PCs? I've done it, but it's just too much complexity.

Still, if you want free IMAP mail, Fastmail.fm is the place to get it. For most accounts, they don't even offer POP mail. And they make an excellent case for why IMAP is better than POP and why a Web interface -- especially theirs -- is better than both.

If you want to use a traditional mail client with Fastmail.fm, you can, but the company's Web interface is blindingly fast. But there's a small catch; for those who do want to use a mail client, Fastmail.fm doesn't offer nonpaying users to access its SMTP server for outgoing mail, instead suggesting you use the SMTP server offered by your Internet service provider. However, a Fastmail.fm offshoot sponsored by Linspire -- freelinuxemail.com -- offers free SMTP access to use with your client software. At one point recently, I successfully set up mutt to access freelinuxemail.com via IMAP and to handle my Daily News POP mail at the same time, sending mail for each service via different SMTP servers.

Now that Linspire is among those Linux providers who have signed "intellectual property" protection deals with Microsoft, you might feel differently about using their free, sponsored e-mail ... and if you really do like what Fastmail.fm is doing, it's well worth paying for an enhanced level of service ... or you can just stick with the free version and stay with their ultra-fast Web interface, or use your ISP's SMTP service, if you're allowed (some ISPs don't let you use their SMTP server if you're not doing so from your home IP address, but my ISP -- DSL Extreme -- is not among those and can be accessed from anywhere).

And for those who want to use a client and crave the speed of mutt (or the University of Washington's pine e-mail program), I've found that Sylpheed is much faster than Thunderbird, Evolution and SeaMonkey when it comes to traditional Linux GUI e-mail clients, especially for old, creaky hardware like I use. And Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and some version of Sylpheed are even available for Windows, should you want to get away from Outlook for your e-mail client needs on the Microsoft platform.

I did have a lot of fun with e-mail on the command line -- using fetchmail to get the mail, mutt to read it and reply, and msmtp to send it (I never got around to sorting it with procmail or using the full sendmail server program). And while I'm amazed at the flexibility of these programs -- while being equally fascinated and intimidated by their complexity and lack of usable, real-world not-a-geek documentation -- I have to do what works for me.

And that is the Web. It's not sexy-geeky, and even though plenty of those around me at the Daily News are figuring out how to use Thunderbird or (gasp!) Outlook Express to POP their company e-mail, the functionality I need -- e-mail anywhere that's always there -- is done better through a Web interface than it is via any mail client, from mutt and pine to Sylpheed and SeaMonkey.

And while I reserve my right to go back to a traditional mail program, I'm going to stick -- for now -- with flexible, grab-it-anywhere Web mail.

So how are you dealing with e-mail? I'd love to know.