On Sunday, January 27, 2013, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 01/27/2013 09:14 PM, Tony Aiuto wrote:
I should have been clearer in my post.
In my experience, most people who won't use webmail justify their
position not on the superiority of mail clients, but on the opinion
that they prefer having their mail in their position, and not "in a
cloud server some where". I'm not going to debate if that is true or
not. It's just what I have had too many people tell me.
But, if you want to keep several clients in sync with your mail, you
need to keep the definitive repository somewhere, usually your inbox.
I was pointing out the willful blindness of people who believe IMAP
servers are less "in the cloud" then a webmail server. Indeed, most
webmail servers, Google's included, provide IMAP services.
So, my, unsaid, staring piont is that mail clients give you no more
ownership over your mail than web mail.
Of course you are correct. Indeed, a webmail program is, on the
server side, a mail client with a remotely-implemented GUI. This being
a technical forum, I'd be shocked, and a bit dismayed, if anyone here
didn't know that.
I'm not surprised by what people willing try to not believe.
In my case, I run my own mail server. Whatever mail
client(s) I use,
be they textual, graphical, or graphical-with-a-remote-GUI like a
webmail client, is still backed by the mail server that I control..
LOL. Well that puts you out of the range of most people - even for this
list.
I used to run my own mail server in my basement. I had exactly the comfort
of total control you have. But the machines seemed to sense when I would
be away, and always choose to wedge up then. After too many times talking
a 7 year old through rebooting the server rack in the scary corner of the
basement, I punted and someone with 24/7 ops handle it.
.not
a mail server run by the world's largest data collection, indexing, and
mining company.
Overall, I'm not sure what is the most secure (in the privacy sense) option.
A lot of factors go into it. In particular, I don't trust my ISP to not
sniff the
mail stream (usually unencrypted) coming into my home. So, I don't really
trust the privacy of my connection there. If I move my servers to a colo,
then I feel slightly better, but I don't actually have physical control over
the hardware, so it's not 100%.
(yes, there was a hint there)
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA