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On the road, at a client’s office, I often use two methods to access my mail: Horde on my web host servers for my personal and professional mail, and GMail for all the mailing lists and other services I subscribe to. After having tried Yahoo! Mail (too limited when it comes to using other accounts in combination), and .Mac Mail–a thing of beauty with, yet again, some frustrating limitations–I came to the conclusion that GMail was the best bet for me. (You won’t catch me using Hotmail…) But first, let’s look at Horde.

Rough but Powerful
Horde is a full-fledge organizer you may only meet when you have a web host. It is generally part of their suite of goodies included in CPanelX, the control panel for the complete management of your site. Having your own private place on the Web is not a luxury anymore. With Hostgator, I enjoy 200GB of storage space, unlimited email address, unlimited domains, on and on… for a measly $9.95 a month. After the terrible experience I endured with Lunarpages, that switch, a year ago, was a great move. And when web domain are under $9 per year at GoDaddy, there shouldn’t be any reason to depend on your ever changing ISP for your email address and basic web page…

Back to Horde: The workhorse is inelegant, but quite powerful, and with tons of messages to sort through and IMAP synchronization of my mail with Apple Mail, it’s nice to have the possibility to run some searches you can save as “Virtual Folders,” Horde’s name for Apple Mail’s Smart ones. Spam filtering there is not tops, though. So I keep that solution for the personal email I only share with friends and clients.

Searches you can save in Virtual Folders with Horde

Catch All… and All
For all my mailing lists and other registrations that can turn bad, I have another domain name I create addresses with that can be disposed of when they are abused. Until this year I had a “catch all” account and it worked great. XYZ Industries wanted my email for their survey and I would write XYZIndustries@mydomain.com, and their correspondence would come to my catch all account. Unfortunately, any spammer creating a random address with my domain name, i.e. random@mydomain.com, would also reach my account. As long as spam filters had to deal with “simple” worms and viruses, all was fine, and my web host spam filter worked fine. Pestmongers have become more refined with time and this solution doesn’t cut it anymore.

GWorld
Enters GMail: I redirect all my catch all accounts to my GMail account and let their spam filter, the best free filter in the business, and let them sift out the crap. I keep my spam on the server for a month, in case I have to search for a message that would have been picked erroneously for the trash. At the end of the first month, GMail had stopped 10,000 messages… Now, 3-months later, the average monthly load has risen to 18,000! You have to wonder how long email services will endure that constant assault. In the meantime, I will soon abandon the “catch all” solution, but the transition is not that simple.

I wasn’t joking…

The only reason why I don’t redirect my own personal email to GMail, is the possibly only shortcoming of the service: it’s not IMAP. In other words, it does not synchronize with my mail client, i.e. if I delete a message in my mail client, it won’t delete it on GMail. Being a POP mail system, GMail offers you to either leave your messages in the Inbox, or remove them.

I find the IMAP alternative very convenient and am keeping that system for my main email account. This way, when I am away from home, when I log into my mail server, the Inbox is the same that the one I have at home, lest the large message archive I keep on my home machine.

Depending on your setup, on your needs, a GMail account may offer a solution to some of your email woes. The private beta phase has ended so you don’t need anybody’s sponsoring you to create your own account anymore. Try it if you haven’t already, you may like it.

Written by Yves

Apple has been working hard at helping us keep our info up to date with the syncing features integrated in Tiger. Still, it can be sometimes confusing, and even alarming at times, when warning dialogs ask you if you want 11 unnamed events to be modified (but how?) or the whole syncing operation to be canceled at once… The process is not yet completely convincing. Still, I have two success stories to report: A public calendar synced with .Mac for my clients, and the coordination of my iCal calendars with Google Calendars. (Accessorily, all this information also ends up on my phone, from across the room, thanks to iSync and Bluetooth.) I’ll share the technical details at the end of the artlicle.

.Mac to the rescue
One of my clients has devised a convoluted system to be informed of their favorite translators’ availability. I love them, but not to the point of jumping through their hoops. Besides, the day after downloading, printing, filling in and scanning, all this information may already be obsolete. So I looked into iCal’s features and, lo and behold, you can sync any number of calendars with .Mac while keeping the detail of their information private.

I have two types of calendars: the practical ones, three, grouped in an Availability folder, covering my work, personal, and associative activities; and the rest: birthdays, holidays, moon cycles, etc. When I add or modify any event in the practical group, the online Availability page I keep on .Mac is immediately and automatically updated.

For anyone visiting the web page displaying this compounded calendar, in Week view, big blue blocks (see picture) mark the busy times. In Month view, lists on start times are displayed (see picture). Not only this system answered my client’s request for availability disclosure, but it is always up to date—as long as I enter my appointments in time. Finally, the viewer, if using a calendar program with the same open source standard used by iCal, can even subscribe to your calendar or simply download it in its current shape from that same page.

Once my Availability page was in place, I realized that I could suddenly direct other clients to this page to help them schedule our collaborations. Once again, this only works if your keep your original calendar up to date. And this is where my second solution makes the whole thing tick beautifully…

Spanning Sync to tie it up
One of my main challenges has been to schedule new appointments when working on site. Either I would have had to enter the appointment on my PowerBook, in an iCal that is not synced (many good reasons for that), or I would have had to use paper notes or other online solutions to be copied back to iCal at home. Enters Spanning Sync, bridging one of the best online calendars with iCal. The software (a Preferences pane) is still in development, and not perfect, but I must say, since I’ve been using it, I have never been so on top of my schedule!

[UPDATE:] Spanning Sync eventually had to become commercial… and presumptuous: they imagined that because of their popularity they could push the boundaries of shareware price. They are asking $25 for a yearly subscription and $65 (!) for a simple license, for a Preference pane! A great one, for sure (when it’s not buggy, and version 1.0 was terrible), but still. Needless to say, outrage has been huge, and on their very own forum. Personally, I am looking for another solution since I will not support this kind of greed.

If this whole sync business has been challenging you like it has for me, give those solutions a try. And if you feel like your own solutions are more effective, do not hesitate to share them with the rest of us, here, in the Comments section, or on our Members list.

How To
To publish your iCal calendars, you need a .Mac (dotmac) account, $70 with a new Mac, $100 renewal. .Mac’s Learning Center has a short movie to show you how to publish your calendar. Priorly, you will need to create a calendar group (if needed) in iCal (File > New Calendar Group; see picture); and configure the publishing details from the info dialog of your calendar or calendar group where you can choose a private server instead of .Mac. The iCal Help also refers to a technical article on how to publish on a private server. This is not as simple as .Mac, of course.

Alternative solutions to .Mac include the Do-It-Yourself .Mac; and, someday, may be, the notMac challenge. In the spirit of the DIY .Mac page, you will find a lot of technical articles on how to set up the type of server with which to sync your calendars by running a Google search on “WebDAV server.” The results are not pretty: You better be seriously technically inclined to follow the steps that will help you save some bucks.

Google Calendars and Spanning Sync are free (as long as they are in beta, at least), and pretty straightforward. If you are not convinced yet, the Spanning Sync video demo might change your mind…

Written by Yves