Adventures in Universal Email

This is the new reality folks. We must standardize, centralize, and focusize. To do this, we bring variant things together. If we do webmail, imap, pop, we bring the various and sundry together into a single house. The Gmail house. Here is how it flows for me. Tell me if you face the same.

I have about 4 different email accounts. They’re scattered to Yahoo, Hotmail, various domains. I want a email presence like a web presence though. It should be the same but able to deal with change. Ideally, I want a hosted environment where I can add, subtract, and even adopt more. A hosting solution provider would appear to represent the best. You can park domains, add those domains perhaps at register.com or godaddy or wherever. Then write email addresses for the parked domains. Each cPanel allows one to park domains. Think of a parked domain as one that has long-term parking enabled but you can still move the car around, make it turn its lights on. Change its status. I’ve been to a few hosting providers in search of the grail. I’ve found one that I think works and the price is decent and I like their minimal approach. But here is the list of features I think you will want:

• You want a central email address that will be yours no matter what. ISPs can come and go. Their domains may crash and burn. Have a place over and above that still lives. Data centers call this redundancy. Lets call it human redundancy.
• You want to have a central place that will collect email. Pick a place you can reach, that provides rules and filters, multiple identities and allows a measure of freedom. Hint: This is gmail for me. Gmail offers that freedom.
• Analyze how you want to use gmail. Do you want a single point of focus for the many places you have out there? Learn how to write forwarding rules. As an example, on my FreeBSD hosted ISP shell system, I need to learn the glories of procmail if I really want things good. If not, I can use a .forward file. On a cPanel hosted site, I have a set of tools. The tools can create email addresses from the many parked domains. Create forwarding rulesets. Allow me a flexible point of presence on the wild and wooly ‘net.
• Finally, understand the limitations and uses of what you are aiming toward. You want a single identity; but its flexible. It can be added to and subtracted from; but email can always reach you there.

For me, these forces and factors coalesce to gmail. Gmail is grand and glorious and not fully baked.  Google tells me its still beta. Yet it far outshines whatever it is that Yahoo! mail brings to me. It does IMAP. IMAP is the grail also folks. It lets you see and share the mail. The use of the hosting solutions provider is not to provide IMAP but instead to provide a focus point that you can reach independently. The goal is a centralized ‘net identity for work, play, research.

You can get there too. Chart out the many places you use on the internet. Web, mail, webmail. They can be brought together. For me, its gmail. For you, it may be a Linux virtual slice from a slicehost or someone.

Finally, go play. Find the force and let your skywalker revel in it. But be aware that the force is malleable and changeable. Adopt and adapt. Be good habilis.