Life After Gmail
Gmail was fun. It was a great way to show the power of Ajax. It made a good application available from all places, all browsers, all platforms. But when you've tried all of its shiny features and seen all it has to offer, you can be left wishing for a great deal more, especially if you're an e-mail power user. I've always wanted a hosted solution, so that I could access it from home, from my smart phone, from any internet café, etc. But also I've always wanted an open interface, so that I can use different tools to access my mailbox. Gmail delivers a great Web 2.0 interface and a not-so-great-but-working J2ME application. But what if I want to use something more efficient than my web browser?
E-mail is a large part of my work flow. At the moment, it's also by far the main means of my communication with other people. And I communicate a lot. It's all text. I can't remember the last time I needed to send or receive non-textual information via e-mail, or even basic meta-information, like advanced formatting. Using a web browser, which was designed for displaying multimedia material based on complicated layouts, for e-mail is a classic example of hitting nails with a microscope instead of a hammer. Not only it's wasteful, it's also terribly inefficient. HTTP was designed to allow read-write operations, but in spite of all the effort, now concentrated on WebDAV standards, the Web remains a largely read-only medium. Web 2.0 and WikiWikiWeb try to defeat the concept, only showing the necessity of external tools when dealing with large chunks of text. I had to use Mozex for Firefox in order to edit text areas in Vim. Now that I'm moving some of the less demanding web-related tasks to text-based browsers (like w3m, lynx and elinks), I still edit text areas with Vim. As for e-mail - Mutt entered my life and secured an important place in it.
The last straw that made me move from Gmail was it's crawling speed. They boast Google's search engine, but while it only takes a split second to search zillions of indexed web pages, it may take anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours (!) to search your mailbox, especially if it's size is closing in on the upper limit. Right before the move, I had about 200K conversations (threads) in my mailbox, which probably amounted to about 500K e-mail messages. Complicated searches never took less than 15 seconds, but more and more often I stumbled over the temporarily-out-of service messages which suggested to come back in a few minutes. For the last few months Gmail really felt like a hugely oversold shared e-mail hosting. And when they can't offer quick and reliable searching of some 2.5GB of messages, they have the nerve to offer 250GB of storage for just $500 a year. Well, I get 200GB for $100 a year from Dreamhost, and though I can't say many nice things about their performance and reliability, they don't claim much.
The transfer of data from Gmail to a FreeBSD jail-based VPS, generously donated by
RootBSD, was really spectacular. There are many stories about Gmail's broken POP3 implementation, but I could never imagine that it's just impossible to do anything about it. I had to delete over 90% of my mailbox before I could really retrieve anything reliable. The deletion itself put my account in a mid-term coma. It took a few days to transfer the rest of the data at a stunning rate of over 2 seconds per message. Dozens of temporary outages resulted in thousands of duplicated messages (it only took a minute for fdupes(1) to take care of them, though), apparently because Gmail seriously lacks transaction safety. If you're downloading 800 messages via POP3 and the connection is lost when you only have finished message #799, you'll have to retrieve them all again.
Luckily, about the only reason I have to visit Gmail now is to move everything it classifies as spam to inbox. Gmail does not make the spam folder available via POP3, but it's filter produces more false positives than my uneducated bogofilter - a Bayesian classifier. To quote Thunderbird's tag line, I finally reclaimed my inbox.
More about it here:
MyEmailSetup.