My email makes me happy
16 Jun 2004I am SO HAPPY to be back to an IMAP based mail system! The thunderbird mail reader rocks. Now I can click on links in my email reader and it does intelligent things; I don't have to open up a scp session every time I want to send someone a picture or file, life is good.
My hosting company Hurricane Electric while having a rather full UNIX environment has never offered anything beyond pop3. pop3 is okay for casual users, but I like the ability to keep my mail more elegantly synchonized between the server and whichever client computer I happen to be using at the moment. I've bitched about it to no avail. They probably don't want users to be constantly connected to a service (IMAP) on their server; so instead they deal with me constantly ssh'ed in using pine.
Now I'm forwarding my mail to my colo server (as well as archiving locally); my colo box runs secure imap and voila, I have email again!
Why does a sharp techie like me depend on a hosting company's server for his domain? Pretty simple, if I'm wandering around mexico for a month I can hardly read my mail much less deal with software/hardware screwups on my servers. It's worth it to me to have someone else deal with that headache and ensure that my domain 'just works'.