On 25/10/2018 12.07, Liam Proven wrote:
On 24/10/2018 20:10, Anton Aylward wrote:
The idea of using the web for email is a miscegenation, and no matter what the Supreme Court says, as far as email goes it is an abomination. It is for people who are one step removed from using white-ex on their screens.
I used to think like that, up until about 12-13 years ago.
It was very limiting: although I had a desktop Windows machine, a desktop Linux machine, a desktop Mac and a laptop, I had to access my email only through one of them.
I have been using email since 1985. I have had the same primary email address since 1991. I only delete spam and errors. Granted, I lost my message archive several times, back in the era of keeping it on floppies for portability, but I have everything back to 1993.
Trying to keep that in sync on multiple machines via IMAP was horrible -- slow, inefficient, and made clients painful to use. Furthermore, IMAP only handles messages, not rules, and I want a graphical rules engine in my client, not a scripting-based one on my server.
(This is one of the areas that the FOSS world has signally and totally failed to keep up with Microsoft, and handed MS a huge commercial advantage in business. I am a trained Exchange Server admin, and practised in supporting Outlook, since both were first released. As a result, I cordially despise both of them with passionate intensity. However, they are the best there is or has ever been at what they do, and the FOSS world has nothing that even comes close.)
Gmail, in 2004, was a revelation. A webmail client that was better, faster and more convenient than my local one. All my email was accessible on all my machines at once, all the time. Later, it was on my smartphone too. Now, it's synced seamlessly and instantly across 2 smartphones, a tablet, 2 laptops, 4 or 5 desktops running half a dozen OSes, and both my work computers. Everything: messages, rules, address book, diary, the lot, and it's all free of charge, too.
I really _wish_ that there was some FOSS service that I could that could offer all this, and synch all the same stuff, and allowed me to use a decent, powerful, current client that was available as a native app for Linux, macOS, Android, iOS and even, reluctantly and regretfully, Windows.
But there isn't. There never has been and I have given up hoping that there ever will be.
Disclaimer for the distressed and defensive:
I am not telling anyone, least of all Anton, that their solution is wrong, or that they should do anything else.
I am attempting to explain why it doesn't work for me, and why what I use is better for me.
But IMAP with Thundenbird, or anything, does sync across many machines. Arguably, webmail is just another IMAP client. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from openSUSE 15.0 (Legolas))