(no subject)
Jul. 1st, 2008 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI've always been a little behind the times. I mean, back when Windows 95 came out, I couldn't believe I'd ever get used to it. I did just fine booting up Wing Commander or Ultima 7 from a command prompt, thank you very much, and didn't need some bloated GUI getting between me and my computer. (Yes, 3.11 was only on my screen [or more properly, my parents' screen] long enough for me to tell it to go away and give me my command prompt!)
I had the same reaction when 2000 came out, and again with XP. My user interface wasn't broken! Why did they have to keep fixing it?!? (I feel the same way about Vista, except that I'm fully convinced that that feeling is entirely justified.)
And it hasn't just been in OS choice either. Take hardware platform (I love my C128!), in entertainment media (love my CED Videodisk player!), in my choice of hobby (I need to make more time to get out and use my grandfather's forge and anvil), and, yes, even in my choice of email client.
I haven't had a web-based mail interface since high school. Yeah, that was a while ago. I don't know exactly how many years; probably about ten. I had Hotmail back then, back before Microsoft bought it. My very first email address was juggle_man@hotmail.com (haven't had that one in four or five years, but I had it a long time!). After that, I moved to email hosted on my own server, on stormdog.fdns.net. It was Mercury Mail running on Kitsune, my little 200Mhz Pentium Pro box, back then. I used Pegasus as my reader. I'd always liked pegasi anyway, so it was a good fit.
Somewhere along the line, my server was upgraded to a Pentium III Xeon box, and my mail client became Thunderbird, which has the most fantastic set of filtering options I've ever seen in a mail reader. I could rave about Thunderbird's mail filtering options for hours! The ability to create custom filters that look for custom x-headers in email messages? Sublime!!
But all good things must come to an end. I really want to start simplifying a lot of my life. One of the things I want to do is move to a slower internet connection, and find other ways to manage many of the things that I use my server for right now so I can, yes, decommission it. It's had a good run, but I want to save on power, time, money, space, noise, and effort in maintaining it.
So I'm moving mail clients again. It will be a slow process as I transition over, but I have an invite from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rileybear67 for a Gmail account, and, despite my protestations over the years about how I was never going to go to this Gmail thing, or deal with web-accessible email, ever...well, the times are changing.
I have a new Gmail address, and I'm going to start using that to respond to people and sign up for new things, and will start setting it as a reply-to address on emails from my stormdog.fdns.net account. God/dess, but I'm going to miss being able to do things like set customer reply-to addresses, or have the nearly 20 distinct email addresses that I have right now, and I'll really miss the kind of filtering I can do with Thunderbird. There is simply no comparison, as far as I can tell, between the two as far as filtering.
But the fact that I have nearly 100% uptime, and that this will be available to me anywhere without a mail client, and the fact that I will no longer have to keep mail services running on my own hardware...well, I think it will be worth it in the end. We shall see.
I'm also looking at options to replace the pictures hosting functions of my server. I've found a few sites that seem to do free pictures hosting, and I may break down and figure out how to sign up for Flickr to host my own pictures. Anyone else have any recommendations?
(You know, I just realized that I could probably configure Thunderbird to still do my message filtering for me. And yes! I checked, and Thunderbird will talk to Gmail! Okay, maybe this won't be quite as bad as I thought it would be. Anybody know if message headers are passed, fully intact, on to Thunderbird from Gmail?)
I had the same reaction when 2000 came out, and again with XP. My user interface wasn't broken! Why did they have to keep fixing it?!? (I feel the same way about Vista, except that I'm fully convinced that that feeling is entirely justified.)
And it hasn't just been in OS choice either. Take hardware platform (I love my C128!), in entertainment media (love my CED Videodisk player!), in my choice of hobby (I need to make more time to get out and use my grandfather's forge and anvil), and, yes, even in my choice of email client.
I haven't had a web-based mail interface since high school. Yeah, that was a while ago. I don't know exactly how many years; probably about ten. I had Hotmail back then, back before Microsoft bought it. My very first email address was juggle_man@hotmail.com (haven't had that one in four or five years, but I had it a long time!). After that, I moved to email hosted on my own server, on stormdog.fdns.net. It was Mercury Mail running on Kitsune, my little 200Mhz Pentium Pro box, back then. I used Pegasus as my reader. I'd always liked pegasi anyway, so it was a good fit.
Somewhere along the line, my server was upgraded to a Pentium III Xeon box, and my mail client became Thunderbird, which has the most fantastic set of filtering options I've ever seen in a mail reader. I could rave about Thunderbird's mail filtering options for hours! The ability to create custom filters that look for custom x-headers in email messages? Sublime!!
But all good things must come to an end. I really want to start simplifying a lot of my life. One of the things I want to do is move to a slower internet connection, and find other ways to manage many of the things that I use my server for right now so I can, yes, decommission it. It's had a good run, but I want to save on power, time, money, space, noise, and effort in maintaining it.
So I'm moving mail clients again. It will be a slow process as I transition over, but I have an invite from
rileybear67 for a Gmail account, and, despite my protestations over the years about how I was never going to go to this Gmail thing, or deal with web-accessible email, ever...well, the times are changing.I have a new Gmail address, and I'm going to start using that to respond to people and sign up for new things, and will start setting it as a reply-to address on emails from my stormdog.fdns.net account. God/dess, but I'm going to miss being able to do things like set customer reply-to addresses, or have the nearly 20 distinct email addresses that I have right now, and I'll really miss the kind of filtering I can do with Thunderbird. There is simply no comparison, as far as I can tell, between the two as far as filtering.
But the fact that I have nearly 100% uptime, and that this will be available to me anywhere without a mail client, and the fact that I will no longer have to keep mail services running on my own hardware...well, I think it will be worth it in the end. We shall see.
I'm also looking at options to replace the pictures hosting functions of my server. I've found a few sites that seem to do free pictures hosting, and I may break down and figure out how to sign up for Flickr to host my own pictures. Anyone else have any recommendations?
(You know, I just realized that I could probably configure Thunderbird to still do my message filtering for me. And yes! I checked, and Thunderbird will talk to Gmail! Okay, maybe this won't be quite as bad as I thought it would be. Anybody know if message headers are passed, fully intact, on to Thunderbird from Gmail?)
