Now for a geeky post: I’ve been playing around with email today.
I receive email at two addresses: my Yahoo address and my Tinmanic.com address. My Tinmanic.com email automatically forwards to my Yahoo address. But I’ve never been able to send email from my Tinmanic address, because I never set up webmail through my web hosting service. (If you’ve corresponded with me, you’ll notice that my emails have all come from Yahoo, not Tinmanic.) My web host gave me three choices — NeoMail, Horde, and Squirrelmail — and they all look sort of icky. Also, I’m tired of always reading my email via the web. It can be slow.
So today I downloaded Thunderbird and managed to set it up so that I can send and receive my Tinmanic.com email from there. I’ve removed the forwarding, so my Tinmanic.com email won’t go to my Yahoo account anymore. (It doesn’t seem to have kicked in yet, though, because I’m still getting Tinmanic email there.)
But then I thought, it’s cumbersome to use two email programs, my Yahoo webmail and my Thunderbird/Tinmanic mail. So I downloaded YPOPs!, which allows you to use your Yahoo mail account through a reader like Thunderbird. That way I’ll be able to do all my emailing via Thunderbird.
I don’t know if this Yahoo thing will totally work. I wonder if I’ll miss using the regular Yahoo web interface or if something will fall through the cracks by my accessing Yahoo mail through Thunderbird.
Also, I’ll now have to set up Thunderbird on the two other computers I use — my home computer and Matt’s computer. And if I’m at a different computer altogether, I won’t be able to access my Tinmanic email.
I wonder if this will be more trouble than it’s worth, all so that I can send out emails that say they’re from “Tin Man” at Tinmanic.com.
You could always set all the @tinmanic.com emails to go to GMail. Then, you can set the Outgoing & Reply-From address on Gmail to be you@tinmanic.com. Thus, all the emails you send out will have that as the address. I’m considering doing the same thing for @hitormiss.org.
I hear ya. My site is hosted with Dreamhost, and their web mail app is SquirrelMail, whose clunkiness I tolerated, until I finally gave in to Gmail and set up my domain-name mail to forward to it.
O Boyfriend of Mine: The only problem is that I want to be able to send some emails from “Tin Man” and the rest of them from plain ol’ me.
But so far, Thunderbird seems to be working for everything…
Ah, Matt, I must’ve been writing my comment while you left yours… I didn’t think it was possible to configure a different outgoing e-mail address in Gmail. (At least I can’t find it.)
Hey Tinman, first off I saw ya at wysiwig, loved your “walking arounf NYC story”.
So this dilema of yours is somehting I’ve been through for years. I hate webmail personally but it is good in the respect that it all stays in one place so no matter where you check yourmail, it’s all there. THe problem with using Thunderbird or any POP email client is that ifyou POP (download) your mail to whichever computer you happen to be using, then there is where it’s at, UNLESS you check the preference setting “to leave mail on the server”. But then again that gets annoying too, because when you get home and check your email, it will download all the same messages you’ve already read earlier in the day, at say your office.
I decided on using Apple’s .mac service because their Apple mail uses IMAP. Mail.app can be used anywhere and I get the same email at any location (home or office). Or I can use their webmail interface for a similar effect. Problem is it’s $99/year.
And I agree, Horde, Neomail, and those ilk are UGLY. Yahoo’s webmail is comparatively pretty.
I hope all that made sense.
There’s no problem using Thunderbird as an IMAP-client (providing your ISP supports it – most do I’d guess). The problem with gmail is that you van change the Reply-to adress, not the From-adress. Some email-clients show only the From-adress. So even though their replys go to the adress you’ve specified, it can be confusing and they might note your adress as another than you like them to.
I wouldn’t use Ypops…it wouldn’t work half the time. The Webmail extension for Thunderbird works great!
Thunderbird works great for me as well, one problem I have noticed is that once Thunderbird gets ahold of the email from my yahoo account, I can no longer see the email when accessing through my web-based email. Kind of annoying, and makes me wonder if this is causing me to not get some emails.
I believe you need to specify “Leave Messages On Server” to have your messages still available for web access. To do this, in TB select Tools – Account Settings – Server Settings under “your Yahoo account”. Select the “Leave messages on server” check box. Choose the option you want under the check box. Then OK. Your emails should be downloaded to TB but still available for web access.