[NTLUG:Discuss] Advice on email account

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 12:41:54AM -0600, Hank Ivy wrote:
> 1.  What independent email account provider would you recommend?
>   Should I go with something like gmail?
>   Should I just pay for a host presence (and IP name on the internet) and have my own email 
> host?

I do a hybrid of these two approaches.  I use gmail as my primary email
provider, but use a permanent non-gmail address (pmichaud at pobox.com)
as my primary address, and set that address to forward all incoming 
mail to my gmail account.  I find this to be much less hassle overall 
than maintaining my own email host, because gmail then takes care of
spam filtering, basic archival, providing an advanced web-based 
interface my mailbox, etc.

If I wasn't using pobox.com for a permanent address, I'd use one of
my other domains as the host address for my email... but I'd still 
have all of my email forwarded to gmail rather than manage my own 
email services (especially spam filtering).

There's also a fantastic program called "offlineimap" that allows me
to synchronize local mailboxes with my gmail account using IMAP.
This means that I can store and process mail locally even when I'm 
not connected to the net (just as if I had my own local mailserver),
and then have everything re-synchronized the next time I connect to
the net.  Let me know if anyone wants more details about my setup.

> 2. Do you have any advice on how to go about changing email accounts 
> without missing important emails?

I'd set up an autoresponder to detect mail sent to the old address
and have it inform the sender of the new address.  Here are the
steps (with some gmail-specific instructions, if you go that route):

1.  Get a new account and start using it.
2.  Set your existing account to automatically forward to the new account.
    See if your ISP has an option to keep this forwarding in place even
    after you've canceled the account.
3.  Have the new account detect incoming mail addressed to the old address
    and respond with a message that says "My email has moved to ....".
    If you have your email going to (or through) gmail, this can be done with:
    3a.  Enable "Canned responses" from Google Labs
    3b.  Set up a filter to detect messages to your old To: address and send
         out a canned response that says "My new email address is ...".

This way you can start getting your new address to your correspondents asap,
and if you miss any of them (or they're too lazy to update their address books
right away) they'll get reminders of the new address whenever they send
something to the old one.

Note that even if you think you'll eventually want to run your own
email server or otherwise don't like gmail as a long-term answer
for email, it's possible to use gmail on a temporary basis for 
spam handling and autoresponding while you're getting your other 
services in place (or while your other services are undergoing
maintenance).  Just set your (new) address to forward to gmail
until you get everything else set up the way you want.

Overall I think it's important to separate the notion of "primary email 
address" and "service that handles my email".  There's a good analogy
with telephone services here:  at one time the phone number you had
was tied to your service provider; switch providers and you had to get
a new phone number and tell everyone about it.  Nowadays, of course, 
you can keep your phone number even as you switch providers.  The same
is likely true for email -- don't place yourself in a position where 
the email address you're using ties you to a specific email service that
you can't switch later without a lot of hassle.

Pm