Bellicose Bumpkin

This is my response to an email I got from a friend

> Hi Mark,
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> I am a faithful reader of your Gazette articles. Thank you for sharing
> your insight on many different subjects.
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Thanks. I apologize for the length of this email. I’m probably over explaining things but want to err on the side of clarity
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> Several months ago, your article focused on PC setups. I recall one
> specific point about those of us using “Comcast.net” or “Verizon.net”
> email addresses, and the need to change when/if we changed provider. So…
> here we are preparing for a switch from Comcast to Verizon and I would
> like to set up an email box that is not hosted by the provider. I was
> wondering if you could give your thoughts on the best service to use for
> email; gmail, yahoo, hotmail…? I note that you have gmail; did you find
> that to be the best choice?

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I think they’re all pretty good. I prefer Google for a couple of reasons. First of all I’m already using a lot of Google services such as the calendar, picasa(online photos), blogger, Google docs, etc. Now let me say you can still use all these things without using Gmail as your primary email simply by having a Google account.
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Using Gmail as your primary email makes Android/Google smartphones such as the ‘Droid more seamless. But my favorite feature of Gmail is that it provides an IMAP interface. This is getting into the realm of geekness but it’s important so I’ll explain it – whether you want to hear it or not. Last time I looked, the only free email provider that supported IMAP was Google. You can check but I don’t think Yahoo or Hotmail supports it.
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There are essentially three ways to access your email. Email providers such as Google, Yahoo, or your work may provide 1 or all of them.

1. Web mail – where you read email with your web browser. Handy in a pinch but limited by the constraints of what a web page is capable of.
2. POP – A protocol for accessing mail via a mail client such as Outlook, Thunderbird, etc. POP downloads all messages locally and depending on how it’s configured may remove them from the server. The problem with that is you might read email on multiple computers with each one having a subset of the emails. Plus since emails are on your computer, they’re gone if your computer dies.
3. IMAP – Like POP a protocol for accessing mail with a dedicated mail client such as Outlook or Thunderbird. The big difference is that mail is stored on the server. It also supports creating mail folders on the server (which POP can’t do). When you connect to your mail server via POP – it downloads the ENTIRE mail including attachments. With IMAP it only downloads the headers (subject, from, date, to, cc). It’s only when you read the mail message that the entire thing is downloaded. This makes IMAP more responsive on startup. Since IMAP keeps the mail on the server (Google), you see the same thing no matter what computer you read mail from, or even if you read sometimes from the web interface. IMAP(unlike POP) will also keep track of what emails you’ve read – so that you don’t have to go through them all multiple times – again if you read email from multiple computers. With things like smartphones and tablets becoming ubiquitous, it is very likely that you WILL be reading email from multiple devices if you aren’t already.

All that said – any of the free email providers will probably work well for you. The big thing, and I’m glad you saw the value of it – is having an email address that won’t change when you change internet providers.
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Whatever you go with, I can help you set it up if you need assistance. The free providers generally have good instructions on setting up mail clients.
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Once you get assimilated into the Google collective, you might check out stuff like Google Calendar. I got everyone in the family to get Google accounts(jake and zach too). I set everybody up with access to each others calendars. Mere mortals might need a little help with this but it is well worth it. The upshot is that Marese and I can add appointments for ourselves and the kids and we can both see it. Very helpful for keeping track of all the sports and junk we have going on. We both use Thunderbird for email which can be wired into the Google calendar. Same with Marese’s new Droid smartphone:
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http://nemasket.net/family-scheduling/
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Sorry for being so verbose but I wanted to be thorough. By the way, I’m turning this email into a blog post – maybe some readers will have different thoughts than mine:
http://nemasket.net/why-gmail/
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-Mark