After several years of pushing all of my personal email into Gmail, I’ve decided that relying [almost] exclusively on one provider is just not the best idea ever.
Google is great. But, as with any cloud service, exclusively relying on just one provider is not the best.
Going forward, I am going to be relying on my own server (which I have been indirectly for several years), as well as Yahoo. And Microsoft Live for Domains (which is freely available the way Google Apps used to be).
I love cloud computing – right now, it’s a major component of my job function. But it’s not a panacea. Everything has its place, cloud computing included.
So, I am not saying “goodbye” to Google. I’m just saying “hello” to others 🙂
I’m interested to hear how this works out. My big thing is I would like a setup where I can go to one place to see all messages, regardless of who the email account is with.
right now, I’m leaning towards the unified inbox on my iPhone
however, there are certainly other tools out there – Thunderbird pops to mind
along with, of course, the different web clients for each service 🙂
Yeah, the multiple web clients is precisely what I try to avoid. I use Mail.app on my Mac now, but primarily the Gmail app on my iPhone since it has push notifications and accounts for the bulk of my emails (the unified inbox on the iPhone has Gmail and work, but only pushes my work emails). The big thing for me is the convenience of going to 1 place to see all messages, regardless of who hosts them.
I like that web clients allow me to connect “anywhere”
I’d really like to see a self-hosted web interface that’d snag all my mail (via IMAP or similar)
1 website that shows all messages would be nice, even if it also hosted some of them (like checking other accounts on Gmail for instance).
I think part of my concern for relying on merely one provider is that if they have an issue – I’m up the creek. The odds of all of my providers having an issue simultaneously is exceptionally remote 🙂
I’m trying Inbox2 (http://superuser.com/q/366161/978) as I type this