Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I sometimes think of myself as someone who want’s to be super-organized (anal?) but my laziness and propensity to get distracted get in the way! I do feel a lot better when things around me are neat and organized, does that count?

I think my first PIM (Personal Information Manager) software that I used must have been Time and Chaos, which was a pretty sophisticated application even way back in the early 90’s. My brother introduced it to me, or maybe it was the other way around. Time and Chaos is still out there and apparently was just completely rewritten. The problem, though, is that if you want to have a solution that a lot of people support, you are probably looking at Microsoft Outlook. But more on that below.

After a while I found Lotus Organizer, which was a cute application which had a more graphical interface based on a date-planner.

Eventually, in ’97 or ’98, I started Using MS Outlook. I liked the fact that it was both an email client as well as an organizer in one. It was the first such integrated solution that I knew of. I finally made the switch and have been using it since. I still think a lot of the features in Time and Chaos and Lotus Organizer were/are more intuitive, but what are you going to do? MS is that 50,000 lb gorilla that is supported by all the other devices out there (phones, PDA’s, etc.) for synching. Of course most organizers can import and export via CSV files and such, but more integrated synching seems limited to only a handful, and Outlook is at the top of that list.

My goal basically is to have one database of contacts, tasks, appointments, etc. that synchs as seamlessly as possible between my home computer, mobile device, and whatever computer I happen to be using away from home (be it my own laptop or a friend’s computer or a public computer at a library, etc.).

In this vein I’ve tried a number of things. One was an Intellisync Go Anywhere (no longer available), which lets you host your Outlook Data and access it from any web browser. The problem with this is that you need your computer to be on and connected to the internet at all times. Mine is, but there’s always issues where the connection might go down and with my luck I would have just left for vacation when some service interruption causes the router to freeze up and require a manual resetting! Also, it was just slow. This was undoubtedly because my upstream pipe is 128KBps!

The other issue that I’ve been wanting to solve for a while is just the whole management of personal email between home and work. I used to work for a place where I had Outlook installed and I would just upload my Outlook data file (at that time it was 10-20MB) to an ftp site, redownload it at work, and then do this again when going from work to home. Quite a few times I would forget or not have the time to wait and with a somewhat iffy connection I would sometimes start the transfer only to get home later and find that it would crap out (or this would happen in the morning. When this did happen I would have to change it so that my messages were not deleted off the server until I got back to my most recent data file, and then redownload the more recent mail and then finally change it back to delete messages off the server. A major pain, as you can see. Eventually I ended up using mainly a web client at work, but once I got home and downloaded my mail to Outlook, it was no longer available on the web! Sure, I could have left a lot of stuff out there, but what with storage limits at the time and not wanting to rely on my web connection for doing everything with email, that just wasn’t going to work.

Then I found out about Fusemail, which is a company that offers a bunch of services that go towards what I was looking for. First, it lets you collect email from various accounts – or “fuse” your email accounts into one. Second, instead of the ubiquitous pop protocol, it offers IMAP, which basically means that the email stays on the server and your client (be it the web or a specific IMAP client like Outlook) is simply a “browser” of sorts reading headers and only retrieving what the user wants to see at a given moment. I still had the issue that I didn’t want to keep all my email up on this IMAP account, and not on my computer, because what if the site goes down, or goes out of business, etc? Also, storage quota was limited, so I couldn’t keep everything up there. So what I did was I would keep the last 3-weeks or so of email, and save the rest back to a local Outlook file. Fusemail also offers an “Outlook plugin” which basically recreates some other types of Outlook data on their server, like Calendar, Tasks, etc. You can synch this with your Outlook File. What I found was that getting this to work properly was troublesome. I got some excellent support from the Fusemail owner, but a few things have caused me to look elsewhere. One is that the web interface to all this Outlook data is uneven. The email client is pretty darn nice, but others are fairly bare bones and some don’t even display things really accurately. For example, if I have a multi-day event and look on the 30-day calendar, it is only listed for the first day of the event. I’m sure that Fusemail will eventually fix these problems, but I just have no idea how big their staff is. It very well could be two guys in the owner’s basement. It could be a dozen more than that, and it will likely grow with it’s increasing success, but right now I’m looking for something more polished.

I think I would have stayed with Fusemail if I had not looked around for an exchange host and found one that was only a couple bucks more per month than my Fusemail account. 1and1.com offers the cheapest hosting package for exchange that I’ve seen, coming it at just $6.99. They also offer a bunch of web hosting packages, but the Exchange hosting is what I needed. Basically, Exchange it Microsoft’s product that takes your Outlook data and makes it into a client-server account, rather than just a stand-alone application on an individual computer. It does a lot more than this, including letting people communicate between their Outlook data – for example schedule meetings and notify/invite others, etc., but the main thing is that it keeps all your data in a central location and then lets you access it in different ways from any computer or device that has the requisite client. So I can use my actual Outlook program at home, but the “Outlook Web Interface” via a regular web browser at home. The web looks and acts so much like the regular Outlook client that it’s easy to get confused which you are actually using. The one big disadvantage is that the web interface is about 1% as configurable as Outlook itself is, which is annoying to anyone who likes to customize their display, or even do some editing of things that isn’t possible on the web.

You of course still have the problem that all your data is kept on a server, and if that goes down you are out of luck. But I think I’ve finally gotten to a point where I’ve figured out an adequate solution for this. First of all, 1and1 gives you enough storage space – 500MB – to where you don’t have to worry too much about running out of room unless you do a lot of emailing of large files. My idea is that you archive your Outlook data every few months, but you just archive the stuff that’s 6 months or older. Of course, this needs to be based on how reliable your exchange host is, and I have no idea how reliable 1and1 will be. I just signed up yesterday. As one of the cheapest out there, I have to consider the possibility they won’t be one of the most reliable, but they look like they have their act together. I will say that setting up the account and getting it working the way I wanted to was not a quick and easy process. It wasn’t horribly difficult, and the information is available on their site, but you do have to hunt for it a bit and certain things do not happen instantly, so after you activate your account, you may not actually be able to log in for a little bit. Or email confirmations with activation codes may not arrive in your inbox instantly, but only after several minutes. This can cause a bit of confusion, but in the end is not too debilitating. I just wouldn’t recommend it for someone whose not particularly technical/computer-savvy. I will give 1and1.com credit for their speed, though. At least for the Web interface. It is very fast to the point where sometimes it really does seem like I’m using Outlook locally…

Now, some of you may be thinking – why not just host your own? This may be ok for those who are lucky (rich?) enough to have a huge pipe going to their house, or basically use their corporate network for their personal use, but neither of these apply. Plus, the cost of an exchange server is prohibitive, plus I simply don’t have time or patience to do all the configuring and playing with such a server even if I had everything else. Once you own your own home, or at least if you own it and take care of it yourself, you find that the free time to play with servers is not all that plentiful – unless you are already a network or systems admin by profession and so all this stuff comes to you second nature.