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Technology

You still use Tiscali? For your PERSONAL email? You heathen!

I discovered yesterday that a chap I regularly work with is still using Tiscali for his personal email. He’s a high-powered manager, overseeing a number of hugely important projects in the Information Technology industry.

You’d expect more.

At worst, I’d expect at least a Gmail account. At best I’d expect some kind of custom service running on (for example) Google Apps or perhaps even Office365 (a lot of IT folk really still have a lot of love for Microsoft).

The last thing I expected was for this chap to be using a ridiculously old, highly limited, bog standard email service. There’s nothing wrong with it per se.

It just annoys me.

The reason I discovered this shocker was because the chap’s wife is having problems. With her sodding Tiscali account. I mean, obviously. She’s trying to get it to work on her Mac. I pointed the chap to the TalkTalk/Tiscali mailbox setup details but there’s some flaw preventing the computer from sending email.

“It’ll be some mail server rubbish,” I informed him. Something like you need to authenticate the SMTP server. Or blah blah. I don’t care. I don’t want to care. NEITHER should he! That, I think is my problem with it all.

Gmail just works.

Anything else, frankly, works better. Gmail, Yahoo — we’ve now got beyond this sort of rubbish, haven’t we?

I haven’t checked to see what kind of ‘package’ you get with the Tiscali email, but given the fact it’s a freebie included for TalkTalk subscribers (as the chap told me, anyway) and given the fact Tiscali doesn’t exist as an outfit anymore, my expectations are set to zero.

It’s so pedestrian, I think that’s the source of my frustration. In fairness to the chap, he just wants it to work too — he doesn’t want to have to think either.

I suggested that he stop expending any more energy on the Tiscali account and swap his wife to Gmail. He can setup an automatic import for all the old email and he can set-it-and-forget-it. Plus it works with everything. Support is even hardcoded into the iPhone email setup process.

What’s the gold plated solution for personal email nowadays? I think it’s got to be your own domain name running on Google Apps. Or perhaps running on your own dedicated server or some kind of cloud system.

What’s your strategy for personal email? Please tell me you’re not using Tiscali.