Sunday, December 20, 2009

Changing mailboxes

A few years ago we subscribed to POBox.com so we would never change email addresses again. We use the plan where our addreses forward on to whatever our current email under our current ISP is, which unfortunately is currently Wildblue's half-arsed "you can just use gmail" system. Which would be fine except gmail's POP3 support is even more half-arsed and broken. For instance, you can't have two clients read the same mailbox via POP3, because each one makes the emails unread so the other one doesn't get it. That's right, in this day and age you can't read your emails from your PC and your smartphone, and gmail acts like that's okay since you should just be using your browser anyway.

When we get the T1 from Fairpoint, we will be closing up our Wildblue account as soon afterwards as possible. But Fairpoint doesn't provide email addresses with the T1 service. So for $6/year more, I'll be upgrading our POBox account to the one where we get actual mailboxes there.

And since POBox is on an annual subscription and my payment is due tomorrow, I'm going to upgrade today, so that the costs will be clearcut, and to save the hassle of doing another payment. Incidentally, that means I will be able to simplify my smartphone's email handling too.

1 comment:

Greg said...

The way I've always done POP3 with multiple clients is set them all to delete after 2 days. Since I touch every device sometime within the 2-day period I never lose mail, and it gets deleted without me worrying about it.

But that's somewhat beside the point with Gmail, since it supports IMAP. Why are you not using IMAP?