So why is email such a hassle?

• It’s more than 30 years old. Email has come a long way, but its underlying protocols haven’t changed much since the 1970s.
• It’s really three different systems. Sending (SMTP) and receiving (POP or IMAP) are totally separate functions, and are often handled on different servers. That’s why I often hear comments like “I can receive, but I can’t send” from clients.
• It’s being used for a lot of things it was never designed to do, like send images and attachments, highly formatted messages, signatures and calendar entries.
• It’s been overrun by spam, and even well-designed spam filters aren’t perfect, and cause unwanted side effects, like messages that get misidentified as spam, or just go away.
• Email software is too complex. These programs that were originally built for offline use; that is, they were set up so that users could read and write messages without being connected to the internet. Sending and receiving would happen in batches. That made sense when internet connections were slow, expensive and charged by the minute. Now that most people have always-on connections like cable or DSL, that process is less necessary. Desktop email client software is a pain to set up and use; as someone who helps many people with email, Outlook is the bane of my existence.
• Many of us connect to the Internet in more than one place — at work, at home, and on cell phones. It can be very frustrating to realize that we’ve left the message we needed to reply to at the office.
• Many of us have more than one email address. I try to keep my work and personal email separate, plus I have a series of email addresses that I use when registering on websites that might try to send spam. And I have several email addresses that were given to me, such as the ones that are automatically created when signing up for instant-messaging services like Yahoo, AIM and Windows Live/MSN.

What can be done to overcome these problems? Here are some tips that might help you and your clients and friends be more productive.

• Get your email on the web. Dump your desktop email software, and switch to Gmail/Google Apps or another online provider like Yahoo. If your Internet connection is unreliable, Google Gears lets you work offline.
• Create a master inbox. If you have multiple email accounts, you can set up forwarding to receive and send email from one place.
• Use IMAP. If you need mobile access to your email, set up your phone software to use IMAP, not POP. By using IMAP, your messages will sync automatically in all of the places you check your mail.
• Use social networks. It seems like all of my friends under 30 don’t do email anymore, but they’re on Facebook a lot.
• Use instant messaging. For short, simple conversations, IM can be very efficient. In a few seconds, you can schedule a meeting or a lunch date. It’s much faster than email or phone conversations.
• Use file-sharing services for sending large documents. There are lots of such services, and new ones are popping up all the time, including Fluxiom and FileShareHQ. And Dropbox and the new Opera Unite service allow you to share files directly from your computer.
• Organize your electronic communications. Celine wrote about this recently, and I’ve talked about it, too.

Oh, and one more:

• Remember your passwords. This is obvious to you and me, but I’ve heard “I didn’t know I had a password” way too often. Online services like LastPass, or programs like 1Password, SplashID, or the free KeePass (Windows and phones; also available for Mac and Linux) can be lifesavers.

How do you keep email simple?

Image by stock.xchng user chris27.

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Curiously Zoho decided that to bring users’ mailboxes offline, Gears was a better technological platform for offline access than the IMAP protocol; though we’re assured IMAP is coming.

Regardless, the offline features seem pretty comprehensive despite currently being restricted to Gears for Firefox and Internet Explorer and with most online features being available offline – messages, images & attachments are optionally available and a clever connectivity detection feature automatically determines whether a network is visible, flipping between offline and online modes as appropriate, with offline messages queued for later deliver when connectivity becomes available.

A Gears configuration dialog allows users to select the number of messages to download initially, how many Sent Items should be stored for offline access.

Finally, though Zoho is pitching mobile access alongside offline support, in reality Zoho Mail is currently only optimised for the iPhone.

Though the offline support appears to work well enough – as do other Gears-enabled services such as Google Reader – mainstream offline access seems a little too fragmented for comfort.

Where standards such as IMAP are pretty much guaranteed to work across multiple platforms, clients and services, supporting entire classes of application, such as email. AIR, Gears, Prism and Silverlight all seem to be mechanisms for locking users into a vendor platform, forcing developers to have to divide their efforts in supporting them.

As an industry, we should be thinking more responsibly about data portability through standards…a complex endeavor, but in the longer term much more viable and stable than the collection off offline platforms and browser combinations we see today.

Read more about Zoho’s offline and iPhone support here…

(Incidentally, I’ll be meeting Zoho’s evangelist, Raju Vegesna, later this month at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo Europe. If you have questions for Raju, please drop me a message!)

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At first launch, word processing documents can be read and edited in offline mode, while spreadsheets will only be able to be read (but not edited). Support for Google Presentations is in the pipeline and will not be initially available. Naturally, collaboration on documents that have been created offline will not be available until the new document has been synced when the user comes back online. On a related note, it is currently unclear how smooth reconciliation of offline documents will be.

Google Documents has been in dire need of offline access in order to realistically compete other office suites including Microsoft Office and Zoho. Users of office productivity suites don’t always has connectivity to the Internet.

Currently, the only Google product to use Google Gears is Google Reader allowing for offline access to RSS news items. Google is not first in offering offline access of productivity apps through Google Gears, having been beaten to market by Zoho and Remember The Milk.

Google Gears for Google Docs will require Internet Explorer 6 and above or FireFox 1.6 and above (not including Firefox Beta 3) on Windows, Mac, and Linux. There is currently no support for other browsers including Safari, Flock, Opera, or the various mobile browsers.

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Now take this line of thinking one step further to the mobile platform.  The mobile computing revolution is just starting to take off and for it to be valuable, mobile access to data is a must-have.  This is why it’s welcome news for web workers that Google Gears is now available for some mobile handsets.

Initially only available for Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile, Google Gears for Mobile will give you access to Gears-enabled Web services when you’re out of reach of a cell phone signal.  Whether you’re in an area with spotty cell coverage or on a plane, Google Gears will allow you to access to your favorite online services once they are Gears-enabled.

Zoho and Buxfer are highlighted on Google’s Mobile blog as being the initial services known to harness the power of Google Gears for mobile.  For web workers, this gives Zoho a new facet of usefulness as we can use Zoho Writer on the go with or without connectivity to the mobile web.

While Zoho is a great example of the utility of Google Gears for mobile, I’ll be more excited about Gears when it is integrated into more web services and more web platforms.  On the web in general, Google Gears is only found as an option on only a handful of sites.  For example, in the Google suite of applications, only Google Reader has offline access.

Additionally, Google Gears is only available for Windows Mobile.  This will be a much more exciting offering when it is available for other platforms including Symbian, BlackBerry, and iPhone.

For the web worker, offline mobile access would be fantastic on a number of applications including email, billing/invoicing information, contact information, scheduling, and news reading.  We here at Web Worker Daily will keep an eye on this space and let you know when developments occur!

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