Bytemark blog : A brief history of email

Comment on A brief history of email by Bob H

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:53:31 +0100

Great article Matthew,

I am one of those who wanted customisation of their mail handling, my family has followed me and is using my host because the majority of mail hosting companies couldn’t account for connection oddities. I use MailWatch to track MailScanner filtering quickly and tweaking the filtering has been very important. I have one domain of mine hosted with Google Apps just because I can and it is good but perhaps it lacks the granularity for heavy business use?

If a mail hosting company was able to provide the same granularity of control as MailScanner + Postfix + PostfixAdmin + Mailwatch + MySQL + Dovecot1.2 then I think it would give businesses a case to drop their internally hosted servers. Adding RequestTracker into that mix would just be the final leap to give them a feature not available with most off-the-shelf systems.

On the mail client side what I have come to realise is that I can’t navigate my email quickly enough. I have many GB of email and at work I have thousands of emails waiting to be sorted into the myriad of sub-folders. I think the answer is tagging and bayes suggestions but I think tagging hasn’t truly been leveraged to it’s maximum. I think it should be possible to browse tags with depth to narrow down the emails. Thus the initial view should have every mail, there should be a tree list of every tag; then each tag should have every tag which is shared with the previous tag. Thus a matrix hierarchy of tags can evolve and with Bayes suggestions mails can be tagged as they arrive (I already use the Bayes sort add-in for Thunderbird). In this way the mass of mail can be filtered down to the target quickly and more importantly mail can be in many places! An email might be to do with marketing but also to do with a client.

Perhaps I need to blog this….

Anyway, good posting!

Comment on A brief history of email by Richard Clegg

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:10:15 +0100

I’m not convinced that the reason people use gmail is the interface. Indeed, if it wasn’t so damned slow I’d use it through the thunderbird interface by preference.

It’s advantages are 1) Free 2) Big storage 3) Great search

The interface is pretty horrible IMHO and the threading into conversations has no real difference that I can see to thunder bird’s threading by subject line.

It’s only the search that thunderbird lacks and that’s a server side not client side issue. Gmail does have the big advantage that the web client and the server are closely integrated but they don’t do too much with it.

Comment on A brief history of email by Hugh Hancock

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:54:41 +0100

Speaking personally, the reason I host our email with Google Apps nowadays is nothing to do with features, or Bytemark support (which is awesome as always) or anything else - it’s that it’s close to 100% reliable.

Maybe if you’re an expert sysadmin you can be confident you can keep your own mail server running smoothly, but for me, there was always the problem that every so often, I would embark on another trip in the “special” yellow half-trained sysadmin bus, do something hideous to my server, and have mail go down whilst I attempted to batter it back to life using half-understood config file commands and voodoo. (I think you may have been on the other end of tech support for that a couple of times…)

TBH, if Bytemark offered a seperate mail server that Just Worked (TM) and stored the email in some close-to-impossible-to-lose format, I’d probably abandon Apps like a shot. But hosting email on my own box means that the buck stops with me when it comes to keeping it working, and given that I’ve got habits like occasionally doing development work on a live server (“It’ll be fine, it’s only a couple of lines of - oh, dear.”), I like the control of my vital services to be with someone more clueful than me!

(Oh, Google spam filtering is also superb).

Comment on A brief history of email by Rajiv Dhir

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:59:29 +0100

Two points

1) As a Fedora 11 desktop user, it looks to me as Thunderbird 3.0 beta is broken and is likely to be launched broken. Why? Because they are trying ti implement a structured LDAP address database instead of the old text based fudge of mork. Except mork works well and there is no standard data definition for the LDAP solution to work. So why do I care. Because Thundwerbird 3.0 beta will only find the primary email when typing in the To/CC/BCC fields. That means that after sticking with it for 6 weeks I’ve downgraded to Thunderbird 2.0 and will have to select a different client. I tried Zimbra but being web based its just too slow….

2) This brings me to my next point. As an independent IT consultant more or my time is spent talking to people than at the command line. For me the holy grail of productivity for the ordinary business man/woman is contact synchronisation. This is generally a painful process, but once established is a god send. I think this synchronisation is the reason Outlook is popular, everything will sync to outlook, at least now everything syncs to google as well. Having synced Thunderbird and Blackberry and rationalised my contactbook is a big thing for me. It helps me at least 6 hours a day. And how did I do it, by creating a igoogle account which means google is used to store my contacts and calendar… and that is why people move to gmail. standalone communications clients are out.

Mobile phones like blackberry or palm pre, will sync to facebook and gmail and oher apps and produce a fully synchronised and rationalised address book and that’s priceless

Comment on A brief history of email by Paul

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:28:58 +0100

I started off hosting my own email for the reasons you mentioned - i.e. the fun of running my own server and to develop my sysadmin skills in case I ever needed to run these sort of services for work.

I could switch to Gmail and let Google do all of this now, but I don’t trust a US company which could easily start to (if they don’t already) mine my emails, move them out of the EU (with its strong data protection) etc. The reason I host my own email solution is because I don’t trust anyone else not to look at my emails, either automatically or manually.

I’ve also had silly limits attached by ISPs in the past (e.g. maximum of 50 recipients on an email), which is why I run my own SMTP server too.

Comment on A brief history of email by Graham

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:55:47 +0100

Bizzarely, I’ve come across this post after just today deciding to bother to set up my VM to handle mail properly. Exim and Dovecot being the core components. I’ve been to lazy to do it in the past because I admin my own mail setup for work amongst many other things, and so have always used my work email for personal stuff. I’m lucky enough that I have a great deal of autonomy and control over my work set-up that nobody questions that, but it’s always been a nagging thing - some of the opinions I hold, that I use my work email for, might not exactly fit in with the ethos of the large public sector organisation I work for. One day, I reason, that may well come back to bite me. So I decided to get off my backside and set up my VM for handling e-mail for real. I just don’t get on with gmail.

I don’t agree that Roundcube is that good - it’s pretty, but it’s feature light. But you’re right, there isn’t a lot going out there in the Open Source world for this. Squirrelmail is powerful and very robust, but very clunky. Open Exchange, which I’m investigating for work, is good, but very heavy for a personal email account. Zimbra, the same.

I’ll be using Mulberry for IMAP access to my VM, and I guess, for webmail, it’ll have to be good old squirrelmail. Sigh.