Mike Wilks' Blog

I’ve been resisting signing up to MobileMe ever since it was announced. I tried to tell myself that I needed a Mac to get the most out of it and that I was perfectly happy with my push Yahoo account. After a brief foray into the Zimbra Yahoo Mail client and getting increasingly sick of the amount of spam my ten year old Yahoo account gets I decided to give MobileMe a try.

Pros:

• me.com push account is great (but then you can get free Yahoo accounts that do this).
• The website application is fantastic.
• iDisk is great when you use multiple machines, much cleaner than my previous solution of manually synching folders in LogMeIn.
• Gallery is an unexpected bonus, I never got around to installing ViewPics and the MobileMe Gallery was just easier.
• 20Gb storage and 200Gb transfer per month seems a reasonable starting point.

Cons:

• There is no synch with either Thunderbird (contacts) or Firefox (bookmarks). I wonder how many people have also installed Safari just to get a way of editing their iPhone bookmarks on their PC (I know I have).
• You can’t play around with the email alias functionality on the free trial. Also the wisdom according to google is that if you choose skip trial you just forfeit your free 60 days.

Really there is not much else wrong with it, sure iDisk is a little slow across the internet but that is to be expected. Even the obvious complaints about secure access are headed off by the IMAP and SMTP servers supporting SSL and TLS respectively. I suspect if I keep using this I may eventually move over to the other (Mac) side completely.

My Yahoo account has now been relegated to a third account alongside my new MobileMe address and my hosted mikewilks.com domain email. The problem with my Yahoo address is I can never ignore it completely, after 10 years there is bound to be some service that I have forgotten that is using it for password resets.

I have used the Yahoo mail web client for about ten years and I never really saw a reason to change. I use multiple machines regularly so I always thought that web mail was perfect for me. A few years ago I discovered that IMAP actually solved the same problem but let you use “proper” mail clients. At the time I’d just changed ISPs to one who gave me IMAP mailboxes so I had a play with these for a while but eventually went back to good old Yahoo Mail.

The thing about Yahoo mail is that it lets me manage my Yahoo mail addresses as well as the mail from my domains. I had the hosting company redirect the mail to Yahoo, set up accounts so I could send from them in Yahoo and it worked for years. It got complicated when I bought an iPhone though because there was no easy way to send from the domain accounts.

Recently I turned my simple domain registration and email forwarding into a full blown hosted domain which again came with IMAP so I have a whole new setup now, again using a “proper” mail client. The bonus is I can also send mail from my domain account on my iPhone by having it setup as a separate IMAP account.

When I’ve experimented with email clients before it has usually been Mozilla Thunderbird but I’d never really got on with it. Then a few months ago I came across Yahoo Zimbra. To be frank the big attraction when I looked at Zimbra was that it allowed you IMAP access to your Yahoo Mail. This might not sound like a big thing but Yahoo are currently stuck in the darkages of POP3 and the only way to get IMAP access is either with an iPhone or with Zimbra. The long an short is that when I tried Zimbra last it was clearly nowhere near finished.

Having installed the latest version of Zimbra yesterday I have to say it is a huge improvement. It has the same familiar look and feel from the Yahoo Mail client but generally seems much more polished and less buggy. When it is finished and the integration to Yahoo online is complete it should be the only choice for those of us who use Yahoo Mail accounts. Right now it syncs mail well enough but I couldn’t get contacts to work (although the site claims it works). Contacts and other pieces of Yahoo are coming later.

During the installation I had an hour or so of head scratching when the Zimbra service wouldn’t start, eventually it turned out to be a rogue “.” at the end of the installation path. Originally I thought I’d accidently added this but when I installed it on a second machine the “.” was back. So if you have 0.90 Build 1278 stuck unable to start the service try reinstalling and deleting the “.”.

I don’t know whether I’ll stick with Zimbra but I suspect I will for the simple reason it is now almost identical to the experience you get on the web. I can count the number of times I have worked offline in the last year in the fingers of one hand so I don’t really need the offline function but it is good to know it is there.