For a service that has been around for as long as it has (I got my first email account in 1987) and that is now so ubiquitous (I have at least 2 email accounts, and almost everyone I know has the same), there is a severe lack of good email software.
Among features that I need:
– have multiple computers (and phones) read the same email account
– spam filtering on any machine should propagate to all the others.
– in particular, emails that have been deleted from the Trash should disappear from everywhere.
– It should be difficult or impossible for any computer to “miss” a message because it’s turned off
– disk space on the email server should be kept under control (at best, server should have lots of disk space. at worst, “remove from server” should be honored)
– it should be possible to retrieve any archived email on any machine.
Why is this so difficult? Don’t other people have this same problem? It seems like people who write email reader software must never actually use email, because this stuff seems obvious to me.
sigh.
My latest adventure is to use gMail as a go-between. gMail slurps all the email off of my mail server, then I hook up all the various email clients up to gMail. This is all in its infancy, so I’m not sure how or if it will work yet. But so far, so good.