Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2008 18:07:06 -0600 From: Erik Osterholm <freebsd-lists-erik@erikosterholm.org> To: Wojciech Puchar <wojtek@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: OT: www search engines Message-ID: <20080207000706.GA19437@aleph.cepheid.org> In-Reply-To: <20080206152432.W3704@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> References: <20080206004405.M9353@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> <47A9B6AB.30505@pixelhammer.com> <20080206152432.W3704@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>
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On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 03:25:16PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: > >not used anything google for several years now. No gmail, no Picassa, > >nothing I can avoid. No deep political reasons, just a personal choice. > > exactly as me. > > i really don't understand people that CAN have normal mail (especially > admins) using gmail. > > it's just strange. Well, to share some reasons.... There are two issues here. The first is why anyone who runs his/her own mail server would want to use a third-party (webmail) server. The second is why specifically Gmail. To answer the first question, it's largely an issue of availablity and backups. Most services like Gmail handle backups for you. Although most don't give any sort of SLA, they will usually put a lot of thought and effort into keeping your mail, and keeping it available (by being up.) If you have the resources to duplicate this, as someone who runs an ISP might, then webmail itself probably has less of an advantage. The second question, "Why Gmail as opposed to other services?" is answered by how Google differentiates their service. The first, and most obvious difference is in storage space. For my purposes, I'll probably never run out of storage on Google's server. Most other free webmail services, however, aren't adequate. I've got over a gigabyte of mail on my personal mailhost alone. For high-availablity mail (primarily for things I may need in the event that my co-located server goes down, along with other important things that I simply need access to without fail), I have several hundred megabytes. If I'm going to use Webmail, Google fits the bill with its essentially unlimlited storage. Then there's the issue of spam and spam blocking. Google does a great job of blocking spam. I'm sure that I could do almost as good a job, however that would put quite a bit of load on my mail server. That server already hosts mail for many domains and many users--anything I can shove onto Gmail to avoid processing spam on my host is going to be nice. With IMAP, it becomes even nicer. I can manage public mailing lists (who cares if anyone knows that I'm subscribed to those, anyway?) on Google mail with their excellent spam filtering, and my personal mail can go to my personal host. Anyway, that's mostly my thinking, anyway. One of these days, I'm going to set up my personal host to encrypt and forward mail onto Gmail, so that it's all available whenever I want. I'll typically read it on my host, and grab anything from Gmail if something happens to require it. Erik
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