Portable Apps and an email solution?

I just stumbled across this while trying to look for something else: PortableApps.com, which appears to be a collection of open source applications that you can run off of a USB drive or an iPod or some other similar device, and then just take the device. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of stuff there for the Mac. Fortunately, I found in a discussion forum a link to FreeSMUG Portable Apps, which is “Free OpenSource Software Mac User Group,” and there I found a link to Thunderbird portable.

And that got me to thinking about my email.

See, I’ve got a couple of problems with my email that have been irritating me lately. First off, EMU’s email system sucks and it just seems to be getting worse. But second, I have a hard time figuring out what email is on what computer. One solution to this problem is to simply use Gmail and leave it all online. This is an increasingly attractive solution, but there is something to be said for having all of your mail in one place.

So maybe Thunderbird portable on my iPod?

If nothing else, there’s a ton of other apps here that are interesting and useful.

3 Replies to “Portable Apps and an email solution?”

  1. Steve, can’t you use IMAP with your email? That is the principle of IMAP; it leaves everything in one place, the server. What I do is use Thunderbird on all of my machines and use IMAP folders to organize my mail. Then about once every month or two, I move old emails from my IMAP folders to my a Local archive folder on my primary machine. So I have constant access to the most recent stuff via any computer (our web-client supports IMAP, too). If something is a few months old, I know to look in the Local folders on my primary computer. And generally if it is a few months old, I’m not in a rush to access it.

  2. Here’s the problem:

    EMU’s email system only gives me 60MB of space, and that’s after I cried and whined about getting that much more– the standard is 20MB. I get 20MBs of email in some weeks, largely the result of spam and people sending me attachments. If I used something like my iPod and Thunderbird, I could easily carry around 4-5GB, along with all my music too.

    But like I said, the more likely solution for me is going to be gmail. But I’m going to wait for the fall to make that transition.

  3. Wow. Yeah. 60MB’s is nothing. I use my cyberdash.com email address as my main storage area and then the local folders for long term archiving. I have Thunderbird configured to access my my gvsu.edu and cyberdash.com email accounts on both my laptop and home computer. Then any message filters I run on gvsu.edu then moves the messages into my cyberdash.com folders since I have virtually unlimited space and can continue to access them through IMAP. However, I did find out that my commercial host email server starts to act squirrely if I have over 1000 messages in my inbox (and other folders–it times out–I think the message header file is too big). That’s why I archive to the local folders on my main home machine once it gets very large in number of messages.

    Maybe some name @stevekrause.com would be your better bet. The transition would be easy.

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