GMail [and other free email] and these lists?

[Christian Walther]

On 14/02/07, Andrew Pantyukhin <infofarmer at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 2/14/07, Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I haven't yet found the perfect email service/client,
> > though. Maybe I should post here when I do!
>
> A personal dedicated box with a dozen of webmail clients
> set up, accessible via IMAPv4 + mutt or whatever when you
> are tired of web?..

Been there, done that I'd say... But it's a pain to do system
administration all the day. Years ago this was fun, but nowadays you
have to waste your time with staying up to date with firewall
configurations, bugs and their exploits. New ways for spammers to get
their unwanted mails into my inbox so I need to install new products,
applying patches...
I'm a (Solaris) Sysadmin responsible for several hundred boxes, so
when I come home i want to have some fun with my private machines.
"Fighting another round in the war for security in the Internet" isn't
fun for me.

Yes, I know, in this case I have to trust that the companies i sign up
with do their job, but I hope that they have departments that dedicate
their time to their tasks.

I consider gmail to be one of the best free mail providers on this
planet. I get more then I paid for. That is to say, I can store nearly
3GB of data on their servers, leaving enough room for even the biggest
mails - and a nice mailing list archive. :-D
Most important is that they don't append commercials to sent mail. And
the ads displayed while in the inbox aren't that noticable.
I had accounts with mail providers such as gmx.net, yahoo, web.de (a
german provider who has won over 40 prices for his freemail service --
don't ask me why). I've seen freemail web sites that were crowded with
ads, or account being limited to 500 mails in total. Ridiculus limits
for attachment sizes. The list goes on and on.
What I really like with google is the label-thing. I don't like mails
being sorted in folders, so it suits me perfectly.

On the other side it's what google can do with my data that makes me
nervous. So nothing is perfect, but for me gmail is the service that
comes closest to it.

Regards
Christian