Creeva’s World 2.0

Pic­ture taken from here

Intro­duc­tion

Pic­ture from here

E-mail in the clouds.   Essen­tially back in 1996 when Hot­mail was first released (in the pre-purchased by Microsoft era) the dawn of pop­u­lar cloud com­put­ing for e-mail began.   The main issue was stor­age space.  I believe that Hot­mail launched with 5 megs of stor­age space for all of your e-mail.   It is frus­trat­ing to know all the e-mail that’s been lost over the years due to inad­e­quate stor­age space.   I now have sin­gle pic­tures in my email archive that are larger then 5 megs.   Times change and space get’s cheap.

Pic­ture from here

When Google released Gmail into the wild it was a game changer.  By offer­ing 1GB of stor­age space it made it seem that you lit­er­ally could keep your e-mail for­ever.   Other providers such as Hot­mail and Yahoo were max­ing out at 25 MB at the time, this seemed ridicu­lous in comparison.

Cur­rently Gmail sup­ports almost 7 GB of stor­age space and Hot­mail and Yahoo went to “unlim­ited”.  I con­sol­i­date almost all of my e-mail to Gmail.

Data Types

To uti­lize e-mail stor­age you can attach any (sup­ported) file and keep it in your mailbox.

Data Secu­rity

While you have to rely on a user­name and pass­word to access your e-mail as the secu­rity bar­rier entry, if you want true pro­tec­tion from snoop­ing it is sug­gested that you either get a web plu­gin that allows you to do encryp­tion with Gmail, or keep your pri­vate mes­sages encrypted and use them with an offline client.

Data Redun­dancy

Since you can for­ward e-mail from Gmail, I have it con­fig­ured to for­ward all incom­ing mail to both my Yahoo Mail account and my Hot­mail account.  If for some rea­son GMail loses my data or in the unlikely event Google goes out of busi­ness I’ll still be able to access my e-mail messages.

It is rec­om­mended that you keep an offline backup of your mail mes­sages so they can be acces­si­ble while being off the grid.

Data Acces­si­bil­ity

With Gmail offer­ing access­ing via a rich web inter­face, a basic web inter­face, a mobile web inter­face, POP3, SMTP, and IMAP; it seems unlikely that you are going to find an Inter­net device that can not access it in some way or fashion.

Con­clu­sion

This is the e-mail sce­nario that works for me.  Since encryp­tion really isn’t ubiq­ui­tous across the board I don’t use it like I should.   Beyond that this sce­nario is highly redun­dant and should allow you oper­ate from any­where with a net­work con­nec­tion with­out wor­ry­ing about los­ing your data.

Pre­vi­ous entries in the Liv­ing in the Clouds Series:

Liv­ing In The Clouds Part 1 — Intro­duc­tion To Cloud Computing