RockDoggy’s Woodshop

I finally cut the cord and have moved to “the cloud” for my email needs. Here’s how I got there.

I’m a longtime user of Microsoft Outlook, since I’m well accustomed to it after years of use with various employers. It is relatively easy to use, not too badly organized, and has a few nice features. I had settled on Outlook 2000, since it is a license I own from way back. Having to spend around $80 to $100 to get a newer version was never very enticing - the 2000 version did what I needed it to do.

The trouble was that I found it to be increasingly crashy. After much trouble for both myself and my wife, it occurred to me that I hadn’t patched it (or any of the other Office components we use) since installing them. Not cool - as a software developer, I know better than that.

So, I patched Outlook and Office up to current levels. It’s great that we now have software where all the known problems and vulnerabilities have been fixed. But I was still experiencing crashes. Many more than previously, even though my wife was having better luck than ever.

It was clear that I had to change something. My choices included using a different client software, or use a web-based solution.

I had previously tried the ubiquitous Squirrel Mail as well as Horde without being very excited about them. These both have been available on every web hosting plan I’ve had for years. Neither one was particularly responsive, and I found them a bit clumsy to use. Plus, I had to login separately for each email account I have, and I have a few.

I don’t use the free email addresses that come from my ISP, but when I did, I never liked those web-based email interfaces much either. They were always slow and clunky, and once again, I had to login to those separately for each account.

I had also tried Thunderbird, but don’t recall being convinced that I should abandon Outlook for it. Plus, my wife didn’t need to be dragged through another email client experience where the default client changed. We had used Eudora long ago, and the transition to Outlook wasn’t always easy. So I didn’t wish to make my wife the victim of my experiment anymore.

Another difficulty is that I like to be able to check my email from work, but for some reason they have blocked the ports that Horde and Squirrel Mail operate on. For reasons less nebulous, they have blocked the SMTP and POP3 ports as well. So standard clients would not help me at work.

I had been using a web-based service known as Goowy to act as my email client at work. But it is a Flash based system, and was slow and clunky to use. It was effective, but hardly compelling enough to make me abandon Outlook at home.

Finally I heard about the Gmail site. Now I’ve had a Gmail account for quite some time - I grabbed one back when they were invitation only, and now use it as my login to my iGoogle page where I keep my RSS feeds. But I had never used it for email.

Then I heard (wish I could remember where) that Gmail allows you to configure it to read your POP3 email accounts into the Gmail interface. So I took a look, and was impressed with how responsive it is. It’s relative intuitive, and with 8GB of space, I can keep as much email archived there as I like. I can customize the display of email from my various accounts so they show up with different colored tags. Finally, their spam filter is top-notch. I haven’t seen a single spam message in my inbox since I began using it. It did catch one email from a legitimate sender as spam, but it was simple to mark it as “not spam” and move on.

I do wish the archived email storage allowed you to create folders to store emails by categories, or at least allowed you to tag emails with keywords for easy retrieval. But in spite of this shortfall, the search function works fine, and I don’t think I’ll lose track of any emails.

The bottom line is that I don’t miss Outlook. I don’t miss the crashes. I don’t miss worrying about backing up my Outlook .PST files, or about corrupting them. And I don’t miss being tied to a single machine for my email access. I can access my email - all of my email - from any internet connected computer I want.

I don’t think I’ll be going back.

Yesterday morning, I left the laptop with about 5 hours to go to complete the Wubi installation. I didn’t count on my Father-in-law coming over three hours later, using the laptop, and closing it - thus hibernating it. He had no idea (uses my wife’s login) and I was beside myself after 20+ hours invested in it.

But amazingly, it must have found a burst of speed during that three hours, because it had completed up to the point that it required a reboot, which is an expected part of the Wubi installation. And, amazingly, it completed installing in short order after the reboot.

Now I have a working Ubuntu installation on my laptop. What I don’t have is wireless network access from it. I’ve looked into this, and it seems that there are some special hoops to jump through depending on your chipset. It would appear that you need to build a special driver for your flavor of wireless adapter. While this was less than seamless, I’d have to guess this is some of the fun you sign up for when you use Linux. I can live with that.

The difficult part is that it also appears that you need to get special firmware for the wireless adapter to work with Ubuntu. I haven’t yet been able to determine that this firmware will still work with Windows XP. Since the laptop is my wife’s primary machine, I’d rather not commit her to Ubuntu if I can avoid it yet. So until I can determine that 1) I don’t need the firmware update, or 2) it can coexist with Windows, I am reluctant to do it.

Another small challenge is to diagnose your problem at the same time as reading the docs on fixing it, when the machine in question has no internet access. It’s slower going than I’d like. But with four kids to pay attention to, carrying the laptop into the den with the desktop machine to work simultaneously. So here I sit: Ubuntu yes, network no.

Given this, and what appears to be “out of the box” support for a wired network connection, I’ve decided to continue the installation attempt on the desktop box while trying to figure out the wireless problem on the laptop.

Of course, it is currently estimating about 70 hours to completion at 2-3KB/second. I posted a question about this at the Ubuntu forums, but never got a response. Your mileage may vary, but at least that machine can be left alone to complete the installation no matter how long it takes. And the “pick up where you left off” feature that the installer has is a great help.

OK, I couldn’t let it go.

Back to the laptop, I decided to click on the Wubi installer again. One feature I didn’t mention is that it’s able to resume a cancelled installation. So it picked up again at about 24%. It’s also downloading at twice the speed it was this morning. Of course, zero times two is still zero, right? But I’m willing to let it roll again.

Out of curiosity, I did a broadband speed check (during the install) just to make sure it wasn’t my connection. While I certainly wasn’t getting my alleged 6 megabits, I was just short of 2 megabits during the install. Plenty of leftover bandwidth.

So I can only assume the problem is with Wubi’s sudden popularity, though their forums don’t reflect much of a problem. Not sure what to think of that. But I think I’ll let this go, and see where we get to in the morning. According to the installer’s most recent estimate, I have 14.5 hours to go.

Well that was unsatisfying.

I tried the download on my little-used desktop after clearing 12.5 GB of space on it, and the downloads were similarly snail-ish. I killed it. I’ll dig on the Wubi site later, perhaps. But for now I quit.

No Ubuntu for me today!

This update is short, since I abandoned the installation of Wubi.  I let it run overnight last night, going to be with an estimated 28 hours remaining.  When I woke up this morning, it was estimating 25 hours, and I guarantee I slept at least 7 hours.  So I quit the install.

I did check the Wubi forums and FAQ, hoping to find some guidance on this slowness, but other than finding one or two other souls with the same problem, I found no answers.  My guess is that something on the laptop (AVG anti-virus, or who knows what) is killing the download speed that other people report being close to 10 minutes.
I think I’ll try again on my desktop machine, and see if the results are better.  More to follow in part 3…