IMAP email providers: what I found turning over a few rocks

["Mark Richards-3" <user=151@nabble.blu.org>]

 Well, so far, my search for a provider who can actually do IMAP and a 
few other basics has been a disappointment.  I should think, given all 
the time that has passed since IMAP has been around, plus all the great 
open source projects which support it, someone would have put together a 
package that just works. 

My search was predicated on the thinking that I don't and won't have 
time to keep our in-house mail system running.  Should something break, 
it's too time consuming and costly to deal with it.  Yet, it works well 
and there are few complaints.  Now I am reconsidering.  The mediocrity 
I've dipped my toes into so far reminds me of Senator Mike Gravel's 
answer to a question about why he's running for President when he had 
stated that he wasn't really serious:  "That's right, I said that.  But 
then I appeared in debates with the rest of these people and realized I 
was wrong.  You know, when I first got to the Senate I was asking myself 
'How the hell did I ever get here?!'  Then after a few months I began to 
wonder 'how the hell the REST of them got here'!" 

So after a week of looking at the offerings and trying a few, I wonder 
how any of them actually manage to stay in business. 

Or maybe I'm just unlucky. 

The list recommended by Ben and run by Nancy McGough is very 
comprehensive but many of the entries are old and the companies are 
(perhaps mercifully) gone. 

Of those I have reviewed several and found one that purported to have 
the combination of features needed.  They set me up with a trial, but 
unfortunately their effort assumed (perhaps somewhat correctly) that I 
knew what I was doing or could figure it out easily.  So for all the 
options available in establishing an IMAP account in Thunderbird, all I 
got from them was a server name and login.  Fortunately, setting the 
IMAP server path to / didn't reveal the server's root directory (that's 
another story!).  I tried it... just had to know. 

After working through this and finding their IMAP to be snappy, but 
sparse, I checked their webmail.  The web-based GUI looked like it had 
not yet graduated from W3 school and in fact may have been denied 
admission.  A rather slow email go-round between (likely) Punjab and 
Boston revealed a hidden URL which gave a much nicer interface with the 
features I wanted: a calendar, notes, tasks, and of course mail. 

Boom.  Too bad those "division by zero" errors ruined the appearance of 
the otherwise pretty display. 

I write software in C, and know my way around PHP and other stuff as a 
result.  I have suffered early casualties of war, and most of them have 
fortunately and perhaps by luck been limited to non-critical, non-public 
exposure.  We code, we learn, we grow (and then later we die).  So when 
a page of errors on a public server reveals full directory paths to the 
offending file, I stop and think a-la Mike Gravel, "how the hell did any 
of these developers manage to land jobs writing this stuff?" 
error_reporting(0); is lesson 1 in php.  Trapping /0 errors might be 
close to #2. 

The experience amplified concern: is the basic data integrity and 
critical privacy of email also handled this way as well?  Yikes! 


There.  I've ranted and vented.  Now I feel better about keeping mail 
running on our own server. 

Anyone interested in helping us maintain it?  Maybe the solution is to 
just contract with someone to take care of it and some other stuff on 
our two servers.  The non-disclosure will, of course, prevent revealing 
the stupid mistakes that I've made!! 


/m 


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