A realization about personal email...

Today, in trying out Evolution on Fedora with Gmail IMAP working, I realized that I REALLY like the threaded view of Gmail's web interface. Now, I know you can customize the view to view emails by subject, etc, and I did that and have been using Outlook 2003 and 2007 with that type of customized view for quite a long time now. The difference between mail clients and the layout in Gmail is that Gmail shows ALL messages belonging to the thread, including all the emails you have sent as well. Evolution and Outlook, to the best of my knowledge, will only ever show you the emails belonging to that thread that reside in the same folder (i.e., not emails you have sent, unless you set it up to save sent messages in the same folder and you are replying from folders other than the Inbox itself... but that's belaboring the point I think, and it's a bit of work too).

So, for now, while I MUST use Outlook for work email, I have never felt the need to use it for personal email and now don't even want to. For calendars, I'm going to start trying out Google Calendar which looks pretty slick. I may even be able to get my wife to use it too since you can sign up for Team Calendars and see each others stuff. Even if you use your own, you can easily share calendars with individuals and can have multiple calendars for personal and shared events. It's pretty slick.

One last thing... it's personal email, not business... so, if it goes down for a while, no biggy! Pickup a book and read. ;-) It's good to unplug every once in a while. If you HAVE to contact somebody, pickup a phone! With that said, I would NEVER entrust an internet service for email and calendaring for my business that relied on internet connectivity. As connected as I am, it's still not 100%... or even 99.9%. ;-) businesses should have applications like these local where they control it's fate. There are plenty of arguments either way, but this is MY opinion.