Technical Details

Where I happen to be working right now blocks port 110 namely pop, (they also block ftp) but that's an entirely different story. Needless to say this is a little frustrating, since I want to read my email and not force other people to start using a new email address to get hold of me (I typically don't use IM either.)

Plan A, was to use email filters in Thunderbird to forward the messages to a GMail account that I created yesterday, the day before Google opened up GMail for general access, btw the SMS registration doesn't work in Canada what a pity, instead I had to get David to invite me. I left thunderbird running and went to work, and low and behold it worked, until I got home where thunderbird started to hang and act all funny, i.e. I had to kill it forcefully several times, so much for plan A.

Plan B, since I have total control over my email server, I've forwarded all my email to GMail and now I access GMail from home via pop which is nice and at work I can see everything via the web. This all works nicely and so far all systems seem quite happy (no crashing). Plus the email isn't mangled due to being forwarded.

Cheers to Google.

Postscript:

A couple of other benefits of this arrangement that occurred to me later:

You get all the power of GMails spam filters, although 85-90% of our email is already pre-screened and flagged as SPAM, GMail catches even more

Because we haven't forked out the money to buy a certificate for our pop server, I now get the benefit of GMails secure POP server, very nice

Of course you now have a GMail address, which doesn't seem as cool after Google's recent announcement.

You have access to their SMTP relay for outbound email, no more fumbling on my laptop to pick a working outbound SMTP server