Nigel Goodwin said:
Neither do I, that's why I use a real address, and not an ISP one either.
I have several email addresses, all of them as real as the others. I have one (actually, a few) for work, another for the band, and so on. I simply redirect them all to whatever I am currently using as my client. For the past couple of years that client has been GMail.
Why should anybody care at all what program I choose to read my email with? Seems like a waste of energy.
Likewise, web access to real email addresses predates any of these 'toy' email addresses.
Yes, I know that. I wrote my own in the mid-'90s and ran it on my own server. I'm pretty familiar with how they work.
How do you differentiate a "real" email address from a "toy" address? If I gave you my work email address, would you consider it "real" because it ends in my company's TLD instead of "gmail.com"? Would your opinion change, knowing that it redirects to gmail.com? Since there is no technical difference I have to assume that the reaction is purely emotional.
I'm not sure why you consider these things to be toys. Some are, no doubt--but that's a function of the specific implementation. That's the case with *any* email server. Some are run more professionally and have better support and some aren't and don't. There is nothing magical or even different about the system; it's just a web client for email, which sits with a server farm, which is just as "real" as anything else. It all boils down to RFC 2822 in the end.
Mine don't, but I can manually increase them to what I wish - but why would you want such massive amounts?. If you want to keep the emails, download them.
So I can enjoy moving them from machine to machine when I upgrade, or decide to move to a different email client, or when the one I'm using is updated and breaks backward compatibility? So I can not have access to all my email when I'm on the road? So I can try to figure out how to have my system allow equal access to them when I have to be booted into Windows instead of Linux? Just not an appetizing option.
I'm glad your system works for you. After years of farting around with the drawbacks of a client-side MUA and having to manage my own filtering/spam blocking and so on, I've just decided it's no longer worth the trouble anymore. I doubt that's the case for everyone.
All that said, the majority of web-based email systems haven't worked for me either. Yahoo! is a toy, Hotmail is annoying and half the time seems deliberately broken unless you're using Windows and IE, and so on.
Anyway, if my @gmail.com address bugs you I can always replace it with something else in my profile.
Of course, it'll still redirect to my GMail account, but at least you'll have to read the envelope headers to see that.
Torben