Godaddy/IMAP/Thunderbird/GMail

Well, the previous information on setting up Godaddy as the mail host for a domain worked fine, BUT it doesn't seem that Godaddy supports IMAP. That basically means you'd have to use their webmail interface or POP if you want your e-mail hosted there. Not good. If you use their webmail, now you have to do e-mail for the domain they host with their interface, then use a completely different interface for other e-mail. That makes it annoying because you can't get into an e-mail rhythm. I do not like POP because with that you pull e-mail off the server and onto ONE PC. Now you can't get at your messages from anywhere. Not good. IMAP is perfect because every instance you use to access the mail provides a window onto the same data and leaves it alone on the server. If you want an archive to save space, just make an archive account (or host it yourself) to free up room on your incoming account. So, I went to e-mail hosting with Google Apps.

Now I want to say a couple of words about an MTA (e-mail application, like Outlook Express or Thunderbird, etc.). I have been ok with the GMail web interface for a while, but that doesn't give me access to multiple accounts from one spot. So, I decided to look at Thunderbird to handle e-mail. It's great. I can set up multiple accounts (all using IMAP) so I can get my e-mail that way. Most all of my non-Google accounts filter through one GMail address (for spam filtering and storage) and then I get at e-mail through Thunderbird (or the web interface if I'm away). One other comment... For a while my Google-hosted domain e-mail would not open in Thunderbird! I kept getting a "Web login required (failed)" message. Turns out this happens if you login to the IMAP server too frequently. To fix this, I went to https://www.google.com/a/mydomain.com/UnlockCaptcha. That was hard to find because the error message was so obscure, but after I did that everything worked just fine. I think I just have to make sure Thunderbird doesn't access the IMAP server too often.