the challenge of email

There are many challenges to the business of email and in particular how it is used as a tool for working together.

Just for a moment I want to go back a stage though and think about how we setup an email service.

My main assumptions - which you can challenge by all means - are:

1. It's good to have an email address that looks professional:
eg joe.bloggs@townvillemethodist.org.uk

2. Everyone working in the organsiation, including volunteers, group could have such an email address if they wanted.
(this could involve email forwarding to a personal (or main) email address as well)

3. It's good to be able to store old email as an archive of conversations (both sent and received)

4. Emails should be accessible from any PC that's online, (and perhaps sometimes from an offline PC).

5. Most people don't want to think about how it works, they just want it to do so in the above way, so it needs to be simple to administer/setup


Many people simply use MS Outlook Express to access an email account that is provided by the internet service provider (ISP). By default this is done using the Post Office Protocol (POP), the key thing to note about POP is that (usually) it downloads each email off the server and doesn't leave a copy there, that means the copies reside on your local PC. Such a solution has been OK for m,any in the past, but with an increasing number of people using more than one PC it has been problematic, eg keeping foolders of 'sent mail' synchronised on different computers.

Using Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an alternative to POP, the main difference is that the email is viewed from the server online, typically a local caopie is not downloaded. Also the folders reside on the (distant) email server as well, so things like the sent items folder only exist in one place, not on each local machine. IMAP has become possible since broadband. When dial-up was the norm, and connecting was very expensive, 'sending/receiving' email and then disconnecting was the best way to do it.

When I started to use eGroupware, an opensource web-based groupware working tool, we soon realised that email was a key part of of the programme, not least because many of the notifictions from different elements of the software used emails as the means of alerting you to new events etc.

At present our email server is the one provided by the company that hosts our URL and webspace. One problem with it is that, by default, it only offers 10 email addresses, also the size of the email server is limited to 400mb across the 10 accounts.

These limitations are one of things that makes googlemail worth looking into. A google apps account can have 100s of email address, including alias email addresses which can be forwarded to a main account(s), and the size of the mailboxes is massive, no problem archiving here.

I intend to explore this more...