Last night I received an e-mail from my airline telling me the aircraft I would be on likely has WiFi but after a bad experience last year where promised WiFi never materialized I decided to download all my email locally just to be sure. Thankfully I was right to take the precaution. Usually I use Remote Desktop to get onto my desktop machine to access my e-mail which is located on TMC‘s servers but when flying I download my inbox via IMAP4.

The downsides are that the graphics in many e-mails don’t show up and when you delete e-mails remotely and sync later the messages are permanently deleted.

It has been a long while since I have flown with no WiFi and my inbox which was down to a few hundred is now at the few thousand level. The reason is I generally check old e-mail when I don’t have new e-mail to check. Not the best system but old habits die hard.

I hope to wipe out a few thousand of these in the next few hours on my trip to Dallas, Texas. So in a way I am actually glad there is no WiFi on the flight.

One thing I am grateful for is that I decided to used the cached stations feature of Slacker (I believe a subscription may be required) so I can listen to lots of music and even comedy without any Internet access and having to deal with downloading it all myself.

More to come later.