Ubuntu 11.10 Will Stay With Evolution But Switch To Thunderbird If It Integrates With The Desktop

Quoting:Yes you can choose to store your data on someone elses computer, if you use a stand alone client. But you can't make that choice if you use a web based client.

Sure you can. Various options (I'm focussing on GMail here, but it should work on most others):

- You can use a standalone app with GMail through IMAP - You can use fetchmail and grab your mail from GMail and store it somewhere else. Then access it either using a standalone app of a webinterface under your own control like Roundcube or Squirrelmail. - There are various ways to pump e-mail from other sources into GMail if you prefer the GMail interface.

The only scenario that doesn't work is using e.g. the GMail interface without storing your e-mail at Google (for privacy concerns perhaps). But that's an odd request anyway. All other scenarious should work, given some IMAP and sync magic perhaps.

Sander as I said already "most people don't have that option."

I veer back and forth between Google cloud and local storage. I'm splitting the baby a bit by using Dropbox to sync files I'm working on rather than use Google Docs, IMAP so the mail isn't on only one computer.

@tracyanne, why couldn't one run a web-based mail interface on localhost? I'm lost here, why that isn't an option. It isn't like any ISP could block outgoing ports 25 and 110 (or their SSL equivalents) without incurring the wrath of many customers.

> It isn't like any ISP could block outgoing ports 25 and 110...

While I wish that were true, gus3, it's not. I've heard of ISP's which do exactly that.

gus,

Quoting:@tracyanne, why couldn't one run a web-based mail interface on localhost? I'm lost here, why that isn't an option.

Of course it is an option, I'm not sure what advantage it gives you over a stand alone client, like thunderbird or Evolution or any other linux based client.

Being able to run one's own webserver,as apparently Sander does, with a web based client, that is accessible whereever one happens to be, does make a lot of sense, for those that can do so. But as I've pointed out not everyone is able to do this. Which means you either store you data on some one elses computer, by using a We based client or use a stand alone client, and store the data on your own computer, which means you either have to sync your primary computer with your portable device, on a regular basis, or put up with having some data on one computer and some on another.

Sanders solution is the best of all possible worlds, it ensures you have control over the data, and makes it accessible where ever you happen to be, and if you use a usb key or some other means of booting into an OS you control, great security as well.

> But as I've pointed out not everyone is able to do this.

And as I've stated: Anyone who runs Linux and whose ports aren't blocked by their ISP, can. All you need to be able to do is fetch your mail from your provider and run a web server. Who are these "most people" who can't? I doubt you mean Windows users.

Quoting:Anyone who runs Linux and whose ports aren't blocked by their ISP, can.

Or spend a few bucks a month on a hosting account, then you don't have the hassle of maintaining your own physical server.

Quoting:Or spend a few bucks a month on a hosting account

That is my choice, as broad band is too unreliable where I am. If I was withing the 5 KM distance from the Exchange, I'd probably go for Sanders solution, but as I'm out side the reliable service radius, I can't ... all it takes is a bit of rain and my connection goes to god.

Quoting:Or spend a few bucks a month on a hosting account, then you don't have the hassle of maintaining your own physical server.

I'm doing this too (with Hostgator). Shared hosting is cheap ... and having an account like this to play with is fun as well. I run all kinds of services and not have to worry about who's watching over the box.

Quoting: And as I've stated: Anyone who runs Linux and whose ports aren't blocked by their ISP, can. All you need to be able to do is fetch your mail from your provider and run a web server. Who are these "most people" who can't? I doubt you mean Windows users.

- Verizon DSL blocks outgoing port-25 traffic except to their servers. I had to cobble together a dialup-as-a-service box to keep my Earthlink email bidirectional.

- Verizon DSL TOS forbids any Net-facing servers. (Earthlink didn't, but for $20/mo more they weren't quite reliable enough; we fell back to dialup too often too long.)

- A Net friend of mine on Comcast tried to run his own mailserver. He gave it up on finding out that many large hosts blindly block incoming email from dynamic-IP blocks on the presumption that all such traffic is spam from compromised Windows boxes... Especially from Comcast, where the standard response to a spammer report to the abuse@comcast.net account is a scripted denial of responsibility (at least as of '03 when I stopped reporting such), so there was no guarantee that the extra bucks for a static IP (in a static-IP block) would get him out of the spamtrap.

> Verizon DSL blocks outgoing port-25 traffic except to their servers.

Yes, Verizon is one of the most worthless ISP's out there. There's a reason we didn't use them while we had an alternative. Fortunately, Frontier seems to be slightly better.

> Verizon DSL TOS forbids any Net-facing servers.

Yep. They want you to buy their business class service to run a server. I don't think they enforce it though.

> A Net friend of mine on Comcast tried to run his own mailserver. He gave it up on finding out that many large hosts blindly block incoming email from dynamic-IP blocks

That's not the same thing. I'm not talking about running your own email server. Yes, that gives you exactly the problems you mentioned. I'm talking about running a web server which gives you access to your email. Use your ISP's email server for sending and receiving your mail (or any email provider of your choice, assuming your can reach them from your ISP), but store your mail locally and read it via a web browser from anywhere you want. But yes, that's still against Verizon's TOS.

@ fischerville --

"Also: are there any good desktop email clients that organize by convo, like gmail?"

Zimbra's desktop client displays messages in conversation view.

Hmmm... Get a Free* Amazon EC2 Micro cloud instance. Run fetchmail to slurp your email in. Read it with Mutt.

* Free for the first year....

> ...are there any good desktop email clients that organize by convo, like gmail?

I'm pretty sure Evolution has a threaded mode. I never use it though.

Quoting: Run fetchmail to slurp your email in.

After some fumbling around with fetchmail, and worrying about its reputation for silently dropping emails it didn't like, I went with getmail instead for my email solution. I've found it to be quite robust enough for my purposes, and sufficiently explanatory when it has problems that I can come up with solutions (typically a change in the header-stack prepended to the email by the various servers). Its being written in Python (which I still haven't learned but, as it's script-level, I could hack at) made our spam-filtering system a lot easier to set up. It shouldn't be too hard to add on a backup stream to archiving on your local hardware so you're less devastated when the cloud evaporates (have I mentioned lately that I don't trust cloud?) -- I can think of a few ways to do that with cron and Perl.

I'm sure Evolution does the same thing, but Thunderbird handles my mailing lists very well. I set it to sort by subject, which is easy to do in any client, but it also automatically knows when I'm in a mailing list because there's a very handy "reply to list" button that I quite like. It only writes back to the list and not a personal reply to the individual in question.

Quoting:... all it takes is a bit of rain and my connection goes to god.

It's the same with my DSL line from good ol' AT&T. Luckily while "it never rains in California" would be over-reaching, it does rain occasionally.

Thanks gdr, jdixon, and Steven_Rosenber for addressing the question re: conversation view

IMO, Thread View (as seen in gmail) is very distinct from Sort By Subject because it minimizes a great deal of the clutter that i always hated about email clients. And i fibbed a little bit in my first post because i am constrained to use Outlook at work, but i just consider it something i have to deal with.

Can anyone attest to the *usability* of Thread Mode/Conversation View in Zimbra and/or Evolution?

I've used zimbra & gmail -- zimbra is my work client (though the web interface, not desktop client). Conversation view in zimbra is much the same as gmail. Zimbra recently started pulling new messages into a conversation if it has the same sender/subject as a previous message... not a reply-to message. All of my various daily cron job/logwatch type messages are now grouped as "conversations", though technically speaking they are not part a preexisting thread/conversation. I'm OK with that.