E-Mails reloaded

I’ve been downloading mails to my local box since I’ve come in contact with E-Mails the first time. During time, more and more development related mailing lists have made their way into my inbox. Setting up a new system, or even switching to a new OS is a tedious task.

For some time, I’ve been sharing my Mozilla Thunderbird profile from my NTFS partition for openSUSE Thunderbird installation. Everything worked very well and I could manage (as in mostly read) my mails from both, XP and openSUSE. But then out of sudden, XP decided that the partition needed a checkup. And bang: A small amount of 10k mails from a mailling list got lost. Ok, of course, these mails weren’t important at all, but what happens if some more important mails get lost? So I was looking for a solution.

As my webhoster does provide IMAP, it looked like a good catch all account, unfortunately the server-side filtering was kinda restricted. So I tested out my gmail account (which has been lurking around unused for quite some years since my first invitation) and explored the possibilities. Things got set up very quickly, and I am quite confident with the all in one collector account which receives and sorts/filters all my mails into predefined tags/folders/labels from all the different mail accounts which forward into the gmail one. Remote management via IMAP and Thunderbird is fine, when you have mastered the first hurdles (mails not being placed in the trash can; not all folders synched on start). And reading all your mails when you’ve got no mail client handy is a breeze with the web based frontend. I am caught by big G. 😉