Say No To Milk, But Yes To Rails

I saw this interesting post about coding for failure:
http://blogs.opennms.org/dj/?p=7

Thought it was relevant, and good advice.

Traditional Offline Email:

• Pros:
• Fast
• Can be read offline (well, DUH)
• Cons:
• Can’t be accessed from any computer
• To clarify, if you download your messages and they are deleted on the server, you can’t redownload them.  If you don’t delete them on the server, you keep redownloading them.

Traditional Online Email:

• Pros:
• Can be accessed from any computer
• Cons:
• Slow
• Dependent upon their web interface working and working properly (much more difficult than just POP/SMTP/IMAP)
• Can’t be read unless you have a network connection

WHAT IS A GEEK TO DO!?

Well, I have great news, Gmail saves the day.  Here is my approach to email:

1. Sign up for a gmail account.
2. Log in and change your settings (top right corner)
3. Go to "Forwarding and POP" tab
1. Under "Status," Select "Enable POP for all mail"
2. Under "When messages are accessed with POP," select "archive Gmail’s copy"
3. Follow the instructions under "Configure your email client" to setup your local machine’s email client for POP with gmail.  I HIGHLY recommend Thunderbird.
4. Save your changes.

Once you have this all setup, you can now download your email on your local machine and still have it accessible from the web through the archive link on the left side of Gmail’s default mail layout.  The way I see it, it is the best of all worlds:

• Pros:
• Can be accessed from any computer
• Fast
• Can be read online and offline
• Cons:
• Can’t think of one, really, but please share if you can.

Happy emailing.