David Kitchen

I’ve got something in the region of 17,000 emails stored at home on my Windows PC in a program called The Bat! It’s a great program, I really love it and my love for it has been the biggest delaying factor in my moving to Linux on a permanent basis.

Recently I’ve been using 4 PC’s, all Windows and Linux, and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to get to my email. Previous solutions have involved webmail (for the stuff I haven’t picked up yet), and remote desktop (for getting to older mail remotely). But that isn’t really great because now I’m dual-booting my home desktop, I can’t get to The Bat! all the time I’m in Ubuntu.

So I’ve been considering the merits of uploading my 17,000+ emails to something like Gmail. Having everything online and accessible from everywhere. The concerns over this though pretty much come down to organisation and access.

In The Bat! I have something in the region of 130 folders holding the 17k emails in a nice hierarchy. I can find things pretty damn quick as I know where I would’ve filed things of certain topics and I’m always right. With Gmail there is no hierarchy, just labels. What I am uncertain on is whether it’s possible to label 17k emails in such a way that it is really easy to find what I want? Labels to me are ways of pre-filtering searches, to seperate an email on the purchase of a hard drive from an email on a hard drive failure that a friend has had by choosing to label one ’shopping’ and the other ‘friends’. But it seems that before I perform an import I should probably think about the best use of labels in reducing 130 folders down to something filterable, searchable. So that’s the first thing that concerns me… how best to re-organise such a quantity of mail for a different way of working.

Access is the second concern, and by this I mean the question “What happens if Google close my account?”. I can’t think of any reason why they would, but they do not provide a business critical service, they provide free webmail, that’s it. There’s no accountability should my account become corrupt. No guarantee that in the worst case scenario I could extract my emails from their system. And there’s no way back either… once you’re heavily reliant on Gmail, you can’t export everything and use a different service. This concern doesn’t just apply to Gmail, it applies to all webmail. It’s perhaps a far-fetched scenario, but still one to be concerned about. It’s almost as if I want a “Gmail for businesses” product in which I can gain a level of confidence over the long-term security (business IP value perspective, not physical encryption) and accessibility of the mail.

So my question to you the reader is… where do you store your email? What are the shortcomings of storing it that way? Can you get to it from everywhere? Is it even important to be able to do so?