Not many people know this (I didn’t) but .Mac has an official blog 
.
The most recent entry, “Using .Mac mail as your everywhere notebook” , points out that you can easily use an IMAP account like .Mac to store information online that is then accessible from any computer anywhere.
A Joyent user, Matt, has discovered the same thing. In a long and entertaining post on Joyent’s forums, he describes an epiphany which led him to dump his information manager and use an IMAP account instead:
So now that I’m using a folder on my IMAP server to store things like directions to that restaurant or my car insurance account number, I can shed one extraneous app, and everything is as searchable and sortable as it should be. Assuming I’ve mailed it to myself, I can find whatever document I need from home, from the office, and from someone else’s computer.
He still has to use Mail.app to search the content of his messages, but for the most part he is much happier in a more Web 2.0 world.
I’ve been doing this for some time…using an IMAP folder for notes and whatnot. It really is one of those things that Apple SHOULD be using the concept of to make Mail.app better than everything else.
Here are some other related projects to really get the creative juices flowing:
http://www.gargan.org/extensions/synckolab.html
This is a Thunderbird plugin that uses IMAP to “sync’ Address Book contacts. It was what first got me into the idea…it lead me to:
http://kolab.org/
Duh, don’t you just know there is somebody already thinking of what you want to do? Apple should be working with these guys.
I’ve talked to a couple of folks in the Mail.app working group at Apple at MWNY. Perhaps I’ll have to see if I can pass along some suggestions.
Yes,I have been done this for a year now. Before that I used to have a yahoo group where I was the only member (pre Gmail days) and I would forward all notes,interesting articles to this group.
I am doing this now on Fastmail, which has an ‘edit as new’ feature in Webmail – allows me to quickly edit my notes/plans and store them online.
I only wish that an application like Journler could do something like this e.g a folder is created in your IMAP mailbox and all your notes are stored in this folder and accessible from your client like Journler. Later you could access this from work or elsewhere and even edit and make changes.
I, too, have been using my .Mac-enriched (;-) mail.app to manage data between Macs, and my mobile devices (W800i, etc).
Makes certain tasks a lot easier, such as shuffling files around. Often, I find it way faster to send a message to myself with an attachment than it is to connect to another Mac on my LAN.
[...] Mail Tags permits something like this, after a fashion, but only within the world of Mail.app. This might be enough if you’re content to use mail as a PIM, but I’m not (and it would get ugly trying to deal with files, and Mail Tags does not currently work with IMAP as described in that article). What I’m describing would need to be a system-level feature that was exposed in mail messages, setfile dialog boxes, the Finder, etc. [...]
In linux, the mail app Kmail in KDE does all of this for you. It syncs contacts, notes, calendars, and automatically loads them into the correct apps for each of these. You don’t even realize it is using IMAP (except for a few bugs, but it is designed to be transparent).