It's time for an update.
Some time ago, George from Polarismail (George_B) was kind enough to offer me an enhanced account free of charge, and I've been using that account as my main account for a while now.
Initial impressions were marred by a bit of confusion about the control panel structure and my inability to find any overview documentation of the whole setup, but once I got the hang of it, everything fell into place, and my account was set up the way I wanted it. I stumbled into a few small bugs in the control panel, but nothing serious, and probably nothing George couldn't have fixed had I bothered to ask him about it.
I sent more than a few support questions to George over the course of the first week, and I'm glad to say that each and every one was answered to my full satisfaction. George comes across as being a very friendly and competent systems admin, and I have absolutely nothing to complain about in that regard.
Some features of an enhanced Polarismail account that I haven't seen elsewhere include:
- It supports ActiveSync, which means you can set up your account as an Exchange account on, e.g., your iPhone, and it will automatically sync your calendar, contacts, and mail.
- It supports CalDav, which means you can have Thunderbird (with the Lightning plugin installed) synchronise your calendar with Polarismail. And this is two-way sync, mind you. You can create a new event in Thunderbird and have it synced with your Polarismail account, not just the other way around.
- Once every 24 hours (I think), a snapshot of your account is taken and is made available as a special Archive IMAP folder, which makes it easy to restore messages deleted by accident yourself.
- GroupOffice (the default webmail for enhanced accounts) is a very feature-packed and quite slick webmail client. My only complaint is the lack of keyboard shortcuts.
- It supports AutoDiscover/AutoConfig, which means Thunderbird practically sets itself up once you've entered your email address and password. All you have to do is set two DNS A records, and Bob's your uncle.
Other than that I've had zero problems with using my Polarismail account, and I hear from others on this forum that Polarismail has proved itself to be a very reliable provider.
Changing the subject ever so slightly, I was encouraged by ioneja to send a few feature requests to LuxSci, because ioneja had previously been successful in getting some feature requests of his own implemented.
I can now say that I have, too. I sent in a request for the (in my view) hideous, blinking yellow status bar indicating new messages have arrived to be removed or at least not blink. The initial response was that they (the supporters) would pass it on to the developers for consideration, and my initial internal reaction to that was, "Well, that was the end of that!" because I didn't think I'd ever hear from them again on this subject.
Today, I stand corrected. Less than a week later, I received an update to the ticket saying that a change had been implemented and would be rolled out to production later that day. And it was. I was, and still am, extremely impressed by their willingness to listen to customer requests and actually take them seriously. Coupled with their strong technical skills and no-nonsense-no-corporate-BS approach to customer care, they still rank #1 in my book with respect to customer support.
Are you wondering where I'm hosting my email today? Well, I've actually opened a trial account with Pobox about a week ago. Not because I found a fault with Polarismail, but simply because of their long-standing reputation as an excellent email service provider. I'm not entirely convinced that their Mailstore product is as mature as their original forwarding service, but I've sent in a few questions to their support department, and it'll be interesting to read their response.
For now, the IMAP connection is very fast, works without a hitch, and their webmail also supports CalDav and CardDav, which means I can synchronise calendar and contacts in Thunderbird. Unfortunately, that's about all I like about AtMail, which I find annoyingly slow and clunky to work with.
However, apart from their reputation, I don't see any compelling reasons why I should pay $50/yr for a Mailstore account when I have a free account with Polarismail that works beautifully... do you?
