MY JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD
No, I am not going to write about the end-of-this-earthly-life experience expected by followers of many religions. I mean the ‘computing cloud’.
Ever since I got a computer with Internet access, I used electronic mail. Initially, because dial-up Internet access was costly in Poland (and probably elsewhere) I used an e-mail client with SMTP and POP protocols to check for new mail and then disconnect. So, effectively, all e-mail messages were stored locally in my personal computer. To preserve those important ones I had to make backup copies, and if there was a computer crash, some would be lost. Of course you could choose not to delete downloaded messages from the server, but then you'd eventually be over the server quota.
This habit of having an e-mail client software installed (somehow it was never Outlook) was one to die hard, even when I learned about the IMAP protocol where messages stay on the server by default. I kept using Thunderbird mail, even though with two e-mail accounts and many folders and filtering rules it would sometimes (or often) go into ‘not responding’, which was annoying when writing a message.
Finally, last year I waved good bye to a Polish provider of web hosting and e-mail services, because they were not able to protect me form spam and abuse of my e-mail address. I had a free Gmail account, but I was not going to use it for business for reasons, which I might discuss in a separate post.
I chose to go with my own domain name and a commercial ‘Google for Business’ account with (for all intents and purposes) unlimited storage. But I still kept using the Thunderbird mail client.
Finally, last month, when my main laptop started acting-up, it was time to reinstall the system from scratch. It was then that I decided to dump Thunderbird and only use Google web interface for e-mails. Rewriting my filtering rules was not that difficult after all, and before that I was relying on Thunderbird for e-mail filtering, even when I was working on the other laptop ‘in the field’.
Of course, ‘your mileage may vary’ and I am not saying that you should do the same, but moving e-mails entirely to the cloud works for me, and I am not going back.
Ever since I got a computer with Internet access, I used electronic mail. Initially, because dial-up Internet access was costly in Poland (and probably elsewhere) I used an e-mail client with SMTP and POP protocols to check for new mail and then disconnect. So, effectively, all e-mail messages were stored locally in my personal computer. To preserve those important ones I had to make backup copies, and if there was a computer crash, some would be lost. Of course you could choose not to delete downloaded messages from the server, but then you'd eventually be over the server quota.
This habit of having an e-mail client software installed (somehow it was never Outlook) was one to die hard, even when I learned about the IMAP protocol where messages stay on the server by default. I kept using Thunderbird mail, even though with two e-mail accounts and many folders and filtering rules it would sometimes (or often) go into ‘not responding’, which was annoying when writing a message.
Finally, last year I waved good bye to a Polish provider of web hosting and e-mail services, because they were not able to protect me form spam and abuse of my e-mail address. I had a free Gmail account, but I was not going to use it for business for reasons, which I might discuss in a separate post.
I chose to go with my own domain name and a commercial ‘Google for Business’ account with (for all intents and purposes) unlimited storage. But I still kept using the Thunderbird mail client.
Finally, last month, when my main laptop started acting-up, it was time to reinstall the system from scratch. It was then that I decided to dump Thunderbird and only use Google web interface for e-mails. Rewriting my filtering rules was not that difficult after all, and before that I was relying on Thunderbird for e-mail filtering, even when I was working on the other laptop ‘in the field’.
Of course, ‘your mileage may vary’ and I am not saying that you should do the same, but moving e-mails entirely to the cloud works for me, and I am not going back.
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