Comments on: Handling Email for Professors (Part II)

By: Ian O

Ian O — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 17:31:28 +0000

In Apple Mail/Preferences/Accounts/Advanced uncheck the “Remove copy from server after retrieving a message:” Your mail can be picked up from multiple computers(home, work, on the road) or read by Webmail at any time. If your data capacity is a problem, select “after one month” or whatever option is prefered.

Presumably Thunderbird has the same option somewhere.

By: Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Five tutorials on using Mail.app

Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Five tutorials on using Mail.app — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:39:36 +0000

[...] He covers the absolute basics in the first tutorial. A second one covers things like weening yourself off webmail and why IMAP is better. [...]

By: jenn

jenn — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 18:03:41 +0000

I too have been thinking/wondering about the calendar thing–and trying to choose between google calendar and iCal.

Also, i’m anxiously awaiting part III of this email series!!! (no pressure tho…)

By: dave

dave — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 15:24:51 +0000

Sure, my brief answer is this: (but I’ll feature a more advanced look later)
Google Calendar is the bomb, really the best out there. But it has a few drawbacks, first that you have to have online access, and since I like to keep things all integrated I use iCal, and Kinkless. But this ends up getting to rather complicated tricks/hacks. If you just want a calendar and don’t mind the online aspect (although there are nice adaptaions for this in the google world) go with Google Calendar.

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 14:07:21 +0000

Any chance we might see some information on calendars? I’m using iCal, but would like to see if anyone has a better system.

By: dave

dave — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 12:24:47 +0000

Eric
Yes you are right gmail does a lot of this, and I would rank it as second best. There are a few reasons though I still think using a mail program is important, more on this to come. As good as gmail is it doesn’t integrate with the rest of my programs, and still depends on having a constant internet connection. As far as junk mail goes, if you use junk matcher or other spam plugins mail.app is better than gmail, but out of the box you are right, gmail is better. Gmail also can be slow.Â Furthermore it can’t handle large numbers of emails (like scrolling thru an archive-you can always increase the number displayed per page, but that slows down loading time), you are still dependant on clicking and load times.Â And finally (here is the big one) gmail doesn’t have “act-on” the most important program for handling email.
But yes, I would agree if I couldn’t sell someone on a mail program I would suggest they set up a gmail and forward all of their mail to that account.
-dave

By: Eric MacKnight

Eric MacKnight — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 05:46:05 +0000

Hi,

Your comments apply to most webmail programs, perhaps, but not entirely to Gmail.

For example,

1. Messages to a Gmail account download automatically.
2. Sorting messages into categories (‘labels’) is quick & easy.
3. You can set up filters (like rules in Mail.app) to automatically sort mail from particular senders.
4. Searching through mail is excellent.
5. Junk mail filtering by Gmail is better than Mail.app. I know this because my mail is forwarded from my .Mac account to my Gmail account, and spam that gets through to .Mac is filtered out by Gmail.
6. Thanks to Ajax the speed of say, adding an attachment, is not much different.

If you don’t need multiple accounts, Gmail is a very good option. I use both .Mac/Mail.app and Gmail as a back-up: if the web server goes down or Gmail is temporarily wonky (which happens fairly often here in China), I can use Mail.app. But 80-90% of the time I use Gmail. Maybe the Leopard version of Mail.app will move me back; we’ll see.

If you’d like a Gmail invitation to try it out, let me know.

Eric
http://www.ericmacknight.com/