Rourke on Technology

I took a look at BigString after a reader of this blog pointed to them as a GMail alternative. BigString is a webmail provider with an interesting angle: when you send mail from BigString you have the option of making that email trackable, recallable, or editable. Even after you’ve hit send.

Everyone’s experienced the problem of an accidentally sent email. Maybe you fat fingered the send hotkey or maybe you pushed “reply all” when you really wanted to reply to just the sender. Panicked, you tried the “recall” function in Outlook, only to have a friend call and tell you that he now has two messages in his inbox — the one you accidentally sent and another one created by Outlook asking him to ignore the misfire.

A week or so ago I wrote about why GMail fails to meet my email needs. I’ve used IMAP for years now, and before using IMAP I read my email on the same server it was stored on. You know, using mutt (similar to elm and pine). I recently switched service providers and in the process of doing so poked around a little bit to find a top notch email provider. After looking at various providers and reading posts in various forums, I ended up choosing tuffmail. Sixty days have passed and I’m happier with Tuffmail than I could ever have hoped to be. What makes Tuffmail so great?

Yahoo! mail and GMail are very usable services today. A majority of internet users are quite happy using web based email from one of these major providers for all their personal correspondence. There are, however, some major limitations to the web based email model that will make these offerings incomplete unless they add offline support via the IMAP protocol. Given these providers’ reliance on revenue from ads viewed while accessing email via the web interface, this is not something I see happening anytime soon.