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Henry Bremridge wrote: > > > I think you will find it is about control. Or the illusion of control ;) > If you have a desktop client > then you control your historical email. If you have it with google, > yahoo or msn it can be very difficult to move the email from one > providor to another That problem is resolved via standards. I provide IMAP4 (POP3) and webmail for my family on a hosted server - if they want to move their historical email (actually I discourage them from leaving it on the server) it is point and click. Several of the online providers provide such interfaces. Standards support should be in the selection criteria. IMAP also sidesteps the "desktop/webmail" debate - you can have both, and even use them at the same time. By hosting my own server I have control of my own spam filtering. By hosting the DNS at my employers (where I'm hostmaster), I have control of the DNS settings. But of course in reality the control is mostly an illusion, if I get sacked, if TUCOWS, or network solutions mess up, if the ISP my employer get their connection from mess up. If Debian developers mess up and break the software (Neil please note!). I think "control" is the wrong way of thinking of these things, one should think, risk/consequences. Moving it into your own domain of influence, means that when it goes wrong you have to sort a fix for it, which may be a much worse situation than waiting for Google to fix something. For most people "fix it yourself" is worse than waiting for Google to fix it. Discovered I couldn't login to my Google account (Gmail - actually this just forwards to my own server, Adwords, Webmaster Tools, etc etc) earlier in the week. The password recovery procedure didn't work (I think it is sending it to a long dead email address), and discovered that if I was stuck there I have to wait 5 days to be able to answer my security question to recover access to my account! (As it happens I could login from home, but not from work - weird!). However even for me, taking control of these things is probably questionable benefit/risk wise. My personal email service mirrors the ZyNet corporate one closely (Debian, Postfix, Postgrey, dovecot, etc), and I use it as part of my personal training, or to try out changes on if I'm not 100% sure how good an idea it is, but if that wasn't applicable I'd probably be using "gmail" and figuring out how to get them to produce a better password policy, or looking for a more responsive email provider. Some of the "Everything over Freenet" project ideas were interesting. There you could inject data into a global caching network, anywhere you could turn up with your keys, you could collect your "email" or "news". The bit they were missing was injecting the applications into the freenet itself. Of course it was just a caching network, but one could imagine such a system were you could pay two providers to provide permanent storage for your data, so that you can guarantee to always retreive your own data. Don't think the world is ready for this one yet though - global cooperately cached and secure (encrypted at least) data exchange - or perhaps it is the other way around. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html