embracing the database

[6opou]

I've been using computers since around 1981, when I first started programming video games on a TRS-80 Model III in the Added Divertive Dimensions (ADD) room at my elementary school. Since around 1984, I had computers which used MS-DOS and had diskette drives, and around 1986 or so, I got my first hard drive. That's 30 years of computer training

Comments

[bubbadlicious]

Welcome to the future!

I started forwarding copies of my email to Gmail a few years ago (during wedding planning) for easy phone access and made the jump to the web interface from using Pine shortly thereafter. Man were those some dark times. The fact that Google manages spam so much better than I ever could sort of cinched the deal.

If you haven't already uploaded your old messages to Gmail and want to, I recently got around to doing that (it was a PitA before they enabled IMAP support).

This Python script worked pretty well for me:

http://imap-upload.sourceforge.net/

You can even preserve all your old mbox folders as Gmail labels in the process (or just create new ones based on your Procmail or whatever rules using Gmail's filtering).

I now have all my old email from the mid-nineties on in one place. It's kind of a trip.

[6opou]

Many thanks for the script. I ended up looking through a bunch of solutions before I realized that Thunderbird was actually the best for me. I can just copy and paste the old emails to the new organization I wanted them in (though, admittedly, even that organization wasn't based in the database mindset and is already breaking).

Unfortunately, all of my really old email was stolen a year back in October, so I don't have to worry about that too much.

I'm currently making the switch to Google calendar as well.

[goulo]

Welcome to 2005! :)

Looking in my archives, I see that the first email I sent from my gmail account was coincidentally to YOU (2005-07-11)!

[shannou]

Living in the future? I'm still waiting for my jetpack!

[mostlyfriday]

I personally hate Gmail--I don't like the email bundling into conversations. I was forced to use it at my last job, and I can't tell you how nerve-racking it is to have the internal dialogue about a business contract bundled up with the external dialogue about the same contract--especially since one can't control what one's colleagues say. I became quite paranoid about checking to see who was copied on what. I much prefer to have the emails listed chronologically, and de-coupled, but alas, there is no way currently to do this on gmail :-(

[6opou]

Actually, apparently Gmail now has a "Conversation view off" option in the General settings, so you can turn it off if you like.

One can also just use a more traditional email client with gmail's IMAP to see the traditional view if forced to use Gmail. I do this even now when I want to send an attachment. There's a command line client that I use to do that.

[6opou]

But, I can imagine that if those options weren't available, it would be a pain in exactly the situations you're talking about. There are plenty of other people complaining about that on the web.