Thanks for reminding me why I never use Webmail

[tikvah]

In addition to my family's accounts, I admin one for a nonprofit. When a staff member used the wrong username for signing up for something, I had to go into webmail to retrieve them.

I found 6 messages by searching on the keyword of the company. Then I went to forward them to the staff member's actual email address. Finding them was easy, forwarding was not.

Click on a message, hit forward, put in the real email address, hit send. Poof. It's sent. And then, even though I could see the other 5 relevant messages during this entire process, as soon as I hit send, webmail lost my search and reverted to showing me the entire inbox. Because? I just don't have an answer for that.

So then I had to put in my search term again and get the list of 6 matching emails. Lather, rinse, repeat times 6. I don't even want to imagine if I had to forward 50 emails.

But, you say, but there are boxes to the left of each email and you can check them and forward them all en mass. Yeah, BTDT. Mass is the operative word. If I check 6 emails and hit forward, you'd think the person on the other end would get 6 emails, right? Nope. They get put into one giant useless email.

It's this very bug (I can't bring myself to call it a feature) that is why I check this email box twice a year instead of twice a month. It's a royal PITA to deal with anything. At least the boxes do work when doing things like delete or move to folder. But for some reason you still insist on a 200 email limit per page. Which is so much fun when I've got over 5000 messages to go through that are almost entirely spam.

Though I will give you that you appear to have added a feature where shift-click will check multiple boxes at a time.

[tikvah]

More bugs:

1) Whenever I do something that takes me to another window, the main window reverts to the default view. Never mind that I pulled down the bar so I could see more messages at a time. I didn't really mean that. Sonic knows how I really want to view my messages.

2) I can't see who a message is FROM. Seriously? How on earth am I supposed to tell if something is spam at a glance? It shows the name in the from field but not the email address. I don't mean just in the list of emails, where it makes sense. I mean if I click on the message to see it. It still doesn't give the email address. I looked through settings and tried clicking on a bunch of things in the message window but it won't show unless I open full headers and page down until I see the From line. For example: "1" <[email protected]>. It just says it's from "1" Cause that's super useful. I don't want to click open more things on every message and page down searching for "From." I want to just SEE it. Ditto if it's a message I want; I still need to see who it is from. Not everyone knows how to put in a name.

3) After I do a shift-click to check a bunch of messages and then move to trash, it goes to a view which is about the same place down the screen as the initial. Which is wrong. To see the last message I left off at, I have to page up.

4) Again with the headers. I can't see who the message was to. I don't want to look at full headers to figure this stuff out. I want to have basic information right up top. Not have to search through all the routing info to find it. I just got a question sent to our nonprofit but I don't know if it was sent to one of our staff or some made up name. Was it a typo or is it an inappropriate message? I have no idea until I know who it was to. Okay, I've taken 30 seconds to find it in the full headers. It's to mailman-owner@nonprofit. Now I know it's from someone who is subscribed to one of our mailing lists. I need that to figure out how to respond. Oh and here are another 20 messages to the incorrect username discussed in my original post. But I can't sort by who something is to. Because that might be too useful.

5) Remember how I forwarded 6 emails to a staff member? Surely when I went to forward another, her address would pop up when I began typing. Nope. I have to manually add it to the address book for that. But look, good old spammer "1" was in my address book. I didn't manually add that one. It just magically appeared. Guess I shouldn't have clicked on that name to try to see the underlying address.

6) Here's a message from "Costco" about an order (yes, you can order things). Is it spam? Or is it completely legit but to a wrong email for a staff person? Open full headers, page down, whoops went too far, page up, there is the to line, it's to a fake address, there is the from line, it's from [email protected]. Spam. Glad I had to spend 30 seconds to figure that out instead of just knowing with a glance.

[sheilasexton]

I've just moved to Sonic for my personal account & have many problems with it that I am just starting to investigate whether they are remediable, so came upon your post.
1. You stay away from "webmail" - is the squirrel mail better? ..or do you stay away from sonic email?
2. My biggest issue so far is that I can't find an email I sent a few weeks ago. I vaguely remember reading & liking that Sonic is privacy focused & don't save emails after 2 weeks, but now see that this could be (is) a problem for me. Is this right? How do other people deal with this?
3. I also have a problem with not having the "from" column in my email view - this just seems too weird to be by design. Why can't I manually add the column, even if others don't feel a need for this view?

Thanks for any help.

[tikvah]

I use POP mail for 99% of my email. It just goes to my computer. I use Webmail for the nonprofit only sometimes. Most of their mail comes to my computer; I only use webmail to check for stuff that went to addresses that don't have a forward. Most is spam and some are typos and occasionally there is stuff to the sonic.net address. The only other time I use webmail is if I'm not at my computer and really need to check an email.

I've tried Squirrel Mail and the other Webmail options and I find they all have pros and cons (slight differences) but I can't say I prefer one over the other...I suppose the newer one is best but I haven't done a systematic comparison.

You don't have a From: column? That is very odd. Did you mean "To:" or do you mean like what I said where it doesn't tell you the email address it came from if there is a name typed in?

I prefer to use email programs on the computer (eventually I'll set it up on my phone but I haven't because I get like 1000 messages a day). I like Apple Mail just fine, though it also has some drawbacks. Some people love Eudora or Microsoft programs.

[tikvah]

Oh, I don't know why you are losing emails. It should save emails indefinitely if there is space. In fact, I had the problem that it was saving emails for too long and my account got full. You can set it so your mail program (if you use one) deletes mail off the server either immediately or after a set period. I think mine is set to a month. Sometimes you have to fuss with the deleted email box too. Is it possible yours were gone because you downloaded them elsewhere?

[cdkeen]

Sonic .. don't save emails after 2 weeks

This is incorrect; we do not save more than 2 weeks of internal system logs. We don't touch your emails!

Concerning display preferences for email management, it is advisable to use an actual email client to get all of the features you want. Only use webmail to access an email you need to get to when you don't have access to a device (smartphone, tablet, laptop, pc, etc.) that you have an actual email client configured on.

Using webmail as your primary email client is a bit like using an extension cord when you should be installing a conduit with properly rated wires; It will work but the performance is not ideal.

[Shell mail user]

[Using webmail as your primary email client is a bit like using an extension cord when you should be installing a conduit with properly rated wires; It will work but the performance is not ideal.

Agreed!
I can see using webmail for bulkmail readers (newspapers, magazine digests, newegg, costco ads, amazon, etc) and for other temporary purposes on a disposable email account.

However, for personal mail, using webmail for a primary email client--it is far too much like using a sledgehammer to remove a splinter. =D

NB: I'm partial to Sonic's outstanding, reliable, shell mail service for daily monitoring and access to my mail, but it's a bit too archaic for everyone.

For POP: I use Pegasus Mail for archiving keepers to my home computer.
While I highly recommend using an IMAP/POP client, I don't necessarily recommend Pegasus mail to new users, some people don't find it very intuitive. (it is still updated from time to time). I retain it primarily because I've used its reliable tools for over twenty years. I run custom scripts, mail sorting and labeling filters (to sort into folders), form mail tempates, as well as mailing list configurations (eg, all members of an ad hoc committee). I have decades worth of folder hierarchies that continue to be a failproof system for archiving to this day. It's a lot of work to set this up on a newer client but many modern clients have all these amazing tools.

I highly recommend choosing a good email client to use on your home computer. There is quite a bit you can automate when you find a reliable client that you like. Good luck!

Janice

[virtualmike]

I personally recommend Thunderbird, from the same folks that brought us Firefox. Out of the box, it's very capable and can meet many people's needs for both POP3 and IMAP. Any needed additional functionality likely can be provided by use of extensions.