Today is the Last Day of February
That’s right; it really is the last day of February!
I’ve been doing more thinking about my question for the perfect e-mail solution for me. I don’t think I’ve blabbed on about it yet, so I’ll do so now (because none of my friends really want to hear about it, and I have to tell someone, so it might as well be on here):
- IMAP: I need either IMAP access or some form of access where I can get to all my existing e-mail on a secure location (preferably with a secure connection too). I have an IMAP server, but to run a secure connection I’d have to layer the connection with some scary utility that’s been ported to Windows NT that I’m a little reluctant to run on my server.
- Synchronised addresses, calendar: This is a big one. Not only do I want to be able to access all of my e-mail from anywhere, I also want to be able to access my calendar, task list, memos and address book from anywhere. Now of course I can do this on my Palm Pilot, but it would be much more convenient if I could access all of this remotely from one integrated web service. I’ve signed up for Yahoo!’s calendar and address book feature and I’ve started to run Starfish TrueSync, which allows me to syncrhonise my calendar, address book and task list between Outlook 2000 at home, Yahoo! and my Palm Pilot. I am so far pleased with the service, but the e-mail is still a no go.
- WAP: One day, when I buy a better cell phone, I want good WAP access to my e-mail. Now, this is probably a bigger challenge because it’ll cost a helluva lot just to have WAP access from the wireless carrier, and the sites that I can visit will probably be limited, which is crummy. But providing I can access anywhere, then I should be able to write my own WAP (read: scaled down HTML) interface for checking my e-mail — maybe even reading all of my (archived) e-mail, given that it should be all stored on an IMAP server anyway!
Now the problem is that I haven’t been able to find any services that offer decent IMAP service (even for a fee) that offer synchronisation and all of those other mundane (however mundane they seem to me, some don’t even offer the most common ones) features. Today I ran across a great service that’s only charging $40 USD/year for 150 MB of storage, IMAP4, POP3, SMTP and web access to e-mail, as well as custom domains — their filtering and spam protection looks pretty good too. They’re apparently working on Outlook syncrhonization which is o-so-very important to me. So, perhaps one day my nerdy dream will come true …
