I cancelled my Pair account earlier this year and moved all of my mail handling to a co-lo box, the same box that hosts my web sites. Dealing with spam is the hardest part, but other than that having maximum flexibility for control over my mail handling cannot be beat.

I have plans to (but have not yet started) export my 750,000+ email archive from Microsoft Entourage to mbox format, and then move those mboxes to my server and make them IMAP folders. I've also considered importing my email archive into some kind of database, either Filemaker Pro or some PHP/MySQL solution, but have not decided what would be best.

I've has some luck with Squirrelmail as an interface, which is kind of nice but I have no idea how well it will perform if it has to deal with nearly 2GB of email stuck in IMAP folders. I guess I should try it and see.

The main reason I moved from Pair is that spammers were dictionary-attacking the camworld.com domain, resulting in 10,000+ emails a day being either filtered or rejected. Pair's customer support team actually emailed me and told me I'd have reject/bounce anything that wasn't a real mailbox or alias, since they noticed a performance hit on the box that was handling my mail for that domain.

I absolutely love Gmail, and honestly can't remember how I survived that long without it. After the huge 2GB expansion, I got to wondering, how much email space is enough? I can't see myself ever using that amount of space.

how much email space is enough? I can't see myself ever using that amount of space

If you keep copies of everything and get a lot of email, it piles up fast. My last two years of email are about 1.8 Gb on my powerbook, so I suspect Gmail will grow at the same rate.

Limitless? LOL. Gmail's very sweet but let's leave the drooling to your soon-to-arrive little one.

Can't you change the "reply to" address on gmail? In the settings, I thought that was an option, or is that for something else?

Yeah, but what have you done with your old email? Left it at your mail app's archives? What happens when you're looking for that old message?

Assuming you're using Gmail via the browser, you have to launch your (old) email client to look for that old email.

Not very nice, no?

What I'm trying to say is: when will Google release an import tool for your old email messages? (The non-Google ones don't preserve dates, so they're a no-no for me.)

Can't you change the "reply to" address on gmail?

You can set the reply-to for anything you want, but the From: line will always be your @gmail.com address, which is how most email software filters work from.

Yeah, but what have you done with your old email? Left it at your mail app's archives? What happens when you're looking for that old message?

I read my gmail in my Mail.app client, setting gmail to automatically archive mail in the web browser whenver my app picks it up, so for now I'm relying on Mail.app for searching, and when it fails, I'll jump to a browser for deep googly searches on my stuff.

It's not the end of the world to abandon your archives, I did it in early 2003, leaving 7 years of email archives on my PC and jumping fresh to the mac. I still have backups of my old PC mail, but it's very rare when I have to search for an old message in eudora (and when I do, I forward on say, a message with login details from 2001, to my current email app).

I was with Pair from 1996 to 2002 or so... I felt bad finally closing the account, but with two of my own servers by then there wasn't much point.

There are two things keeping me from using Gmail: lack of import options, and export options. I'd like to be able to switch email clients at any time, and I'm reluctant to lock myself into a "beta" service.

Archiving some and not all email has been my own personal holy grail for a while.

I recently came across this - a new Daylite feature that I think does the trick:
http://www.marketcircle.com/daylite/mail.html

Looks nice so far.

I have been with Pair since 1999 and have seven domains on my account. I have been thinking of switching myself, as I have found hosting accounts for a fraction of the cost... but I am reluctant to switch due to reliability of other servers and the companies.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned so far that any GUI mail client will allow you to set the From header to whatever you like. You could be president@whitehouse.gov, for all your ISP's SMTP server knows.

A restrictive ISP might disallow sending mail from arbitrary domains via their own SMTP server, but this is not the norm for broadband (Earthlink excepted) -- too many people working from home who'd get bent out of shape.

I've had a Pair account since 1998 or 1999. I briefly considered TextDrive, but the lack of qmail was a dealbreaker.

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