Jan Keromnes

Thank you, IMAP and auto-save!

Minutes ago, I was checking my emails and responding to someone a particularly long and sophisticated email that took me some time to write. Suddenly, the screen of my laptop was black, and my computer started booting as if I had not just been typing merrily, milliseconds before. Half expecting the worse, I reopened Thunderbird once my operating system was up and running again, and there it was. The “new account” window, where you write you name and email address the first time you launch the mail client. All my emails – years and years of them: family, friends, work… plus more than a hundred still unread and unanswered – all had vanished into some kind of digital vortex, along with the small novel-sized unsent and unsaved email that I had almost finished typing.

What could have been one horrible full-scale email apocalypse ending in tears, rage and despair, was in fact just a minor inconvenience. Luckily for me, all my email accounts were IMAP (meaning the emails actually stay on the server, and I only access a synchronized copy of them), and Thunderbird had been auto-saving the email I was typing all along. So I just went to Gmail, found my email in the draft folder – all good and up to date – and just hit the “Send” button.

Now what do we learn from situations like this? Just that life is full of surprises, I guess, and that IMAP rocks. My computer can forget all about me having emails, I don’t care: they’re safe, somewhere, in the clouds…