techNOcool

Good questions, James. Up until a couple of days ago I would have said the
first question should be "Are our students even interested in reading email
anymore?". But the recent ECAR survey of Student Technology use reported
that 99% of students read email daily. That surprised me. Everything else
I'd heard pointed to them thinking email was so last century.

So given that they will continue reading email, how do I think they will do
it? Web-based will definitely be the preference. Both of my own kids read
their email this way, even though they could set up a POP or IMAP client.
And even though in Tom's case, he has 5 MB limit on his school account.

And it makes sense. Using a web client gets around a ton of issues with
email that those of us who have used desktop clients barely think about
anymore because we're so used to putting up with them. Like knowing your
incoming and outgoing server names. Like getting access to your email from
your home and work computer. Like being able to send email when you're
travelling. Like being able to access old emails when you're not at the
workstation you consider your main email computer.

Kids raised on Gmail don't want to deal with any of these issues.

But us old-timers will be using desktop clients for a while, I think. We've
gotten used to the added features a client can offer. I adore the ability
to see a full-screen slide show of photos attached to an email which Apple
Mail offers, for instance. As more of these sorts of features show up in
web email clients maybe I'll consider a move. But for now my desktop
clients are sticking around for a while.

The way I sell Eudora to new users these days is playing up the fact that its search is pretty comparable to Gmail.

Going server-based isn't a magic bullet. Now you have to ponder all that disk space. But in our case, email is already sitting on backup servers. Why not just move it to an email server? (The little devil on my shoulder says, "Because if people actually did their backups, we'd double our data load. At least...)

Another quick comment regarding Penelope. I tried to convert to Penelope/Eudora 8 and it began to trash my email beyond recognition. I spent an hour rearranging and rescuing my email - my email is the only thing in my office I would call organized - before deciding it was still not too late to stick with Eudora 7. I pulled the plug with a great sigh of relief. Imagining that times 400 employees makes me ill.