TuffMail and Horde

Just in case anyone wondered. Horde is better than Alliance in World of Warcraft. kthxbye.

Oh, and I was alerted to an article on OS News about an interview with the Lead Developer of Horde. I'm using TuffMail for my mail and I'm really happy with their implementation of Horde. I normally use a client, but I'm finding the AJAX interface to work great.

I could write lots about TuffMail, and I might... but I'm working on a few things at once right now. Maybe later, or maybe I'll just come back to this. I've got a piece of paper in my wallet that I used to do my pro/con evaluation. Sort of the "idea on a napkin" thing, except I never go to Starbucks. I'd like to make that piece of paper go away.

Then there's the Team Leader at my client site. He's a mac guy, but he doesn't know anything about Mac yet. So, he asks questions to the guy that sits next to me. I try to stay out of it. But, in recent weeks he's been trying out MobileMe.

I really, really wanted to chime in and say that there's no reason to pay for all that, just because you use a Mac. But those guys have money to waste, so I'll just let them. I don't so I just use less sexy alternatives.

So, here's what happened with my mail... I went to Purdue University, got IMAP, and need it for e-mail. POP is inadequate. I need server-side filters. I like to switch computers, and clients, and all sorts of good crazy super-sexy stuff to use my e-mail. Webmail is cool, but I prefer a desktop client.

When I left Purdue, I wanted IMAP, but I picked some free provider. They failed on something important that I won't mention here. I got hooked up with FastMail, and they were doing cool stuff.

Then FastMail slowed down on adding features that were important to me, and were promised for the future. It didn't bother me much, because nobody else had them. I tried others and kept coming back.

The straws that broke the camels back was the address book and the web interface. I didn't mind the web client interface at FastMail looking like something some developer hacked together to support features of their custom-built web service. I just used a client. The address book was similarly abysmal. But, I really used e-mail to receive, rather than send, and I could remember or look up the addresses that I needed.

I decided those things were important, and I switched to TuffMail. I'm happy. I can give up the features that FastMail had that are cool.

So, here we go, I'm just going to copy my notes somewhat. I might have to clean up this post later:

Exclusive FastMail positives: proxy servers, file space / picture gallery.

Exclusive TuffMail positives: web clients, managesieve

Negatives on FastMail: Enhanced Account required for all features, have to log in to manage server-side filters, address book

Negatives on TuffMail: No real a la carte options, just more of everything, no integrated file space,

Some stuff is kind of a wash, or doesn't really matter, like saving searches as virtual folders, plus-mail addressing, sub-domain addressing, labels and custom IMAP flags.

The thing that bothers me the most about FastMail is just that they spend effort to recreate something that works well already with their web interface, and then slowly develop extra features that don't matter to me, rather than the ones I want. People are screaming for a better web interface in the forums, and they could just run Horde, and that could run along side their custom interface.

TuffMail does simple things consistently. And, at the end of the day, e-mail is simple. We stack things on top of it, and combine things with it to make it more than e-mail, but they don't need to be part of the core e-mail service. More importantly, adding those things to the core service don't add value that I need to pay for. Twenty bucks a year isn't much, but it is less than forty. That's really why I switched. I wasn't willing to pay for extra stuff just to get the few features I wanted but never came.

Oh, and GMail has great IMAP... but I don't want my stuff to belong to google.

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