Help Me Choose an Email App

I’m in the process of deWindowsification, with a MacBook Pro notebook waiting in the wings to take the place of my tired old Acer. I already have a Mac Pro at home. As part of the switch, I’m looking into changing email clients. Right now I use Thunderbird on my notebook but have a few issues with it:

• I have a several filters and I get an annoying error message fairly frequently when downloading mails. This is particularly irksome when there are a lot of mails to download, since there’s no way I could find to stop the download and regenerate the index, so I have to sit there clicking OK in the dialog box over and over again instead of doing something fun and interesting like watching paint dry.
• I can’t access my email unless I have my notebook with me. I guess this will be less of an issue once I get my Nokia E90.
• Sometimes when I’m traveling the hotel network won’t let me connect to our SMTP server so I can’t send mail.
• No full-text search.
• No fancy features like Gmail’s stars and threads.

I was going to migrate to Gmail, and I found a tool to upload my old mails. But it’s really buggy (it keeps freezing during upload) and the timestamps of all the mails get replaced by the time they are received by Gmail. I uploaded a few thousand mails, which took several days, then got fed up. Other weaknesses of Gmail are the lack of offline capabilities and the annoyingly pointless advertisements plastered all over it.

What I want is to be able to access my mail on both my Macs and my future smartphone. I guess the latter moderates the need for webmail but some sort of web access would still be nice. Offline access on the laptop is definitely a big plus. The kicker is that I’ve been playing with Gmail and the full-text search is really killer. I don’t think I can live without this.

So I’m at a bit of a loss. I still think Gmail+POP would be the best solution if I can find some way to import my old mails. Or do I try to fix my Thunderbird issues (I’m sending this to Planet Mozilla in case this is of interest to the Thunderbird folks)? I guess I can do full text with Thunderbird using Google Desktop, although I didn’t get this to work last time I tried it (admittedly I didn’t try very hard). Or Apple’s Mail application? Would I be able to synchronize between my two Macs? Do I need IMAP? How are other people handling this?

Bookmark to:

20 Comments »

1. There is an offline mode in gmail. Look at the top right corner of the application. It uses google gear.

   Comment by kanjiroushi — 8/16/2007 @ 11:29 am

2. Yeah? I thought they only supported Google Reader right now. I don’t see the option in my Gmail.

   Comment by Matt — 8/16/2007 @ 11:35 am

3. Thunderbird can be used with Spotlight search. I have that running with the current Thunderbird 2.
   You want https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290057

   You’d have to install an “mdimporter”, and set a pref that makes Thunderbird write each mail message to a separate file. That’s the only way Spotlight will parse it and fire Thunderbird from the search results list.
   Further reads:
   http://www.dennis.ca/weblog/2007/04/17/howto-make-spotlight-and-google-desktop-index-thunderbird-messages/
   http://razal.de/~ibn/techblog/mac/thunderbird_n_spotlight.html

   Comment by Thomas Stache — 8/16/2007 @ 11:57 am

4. I wanted to like Apple Mail, and used it for a while a few years ago — but a couple of “upgrades” ago it just stopped being able to cope with my email (several accounts, thousands of messages each). It just spins and dies.

   I’ve gradually migrated from Thunderbird to GMail, and am pretty happy with the result. Mulberry is another option — it’s very IMAP-savvy, and its developer has relented and is supporting it again (a bit), but I don’t expect it to ever get the attention needed to make it perfect.

   Personally I send all my email to both GMail and an IMAP server. The IMAP copy is a failsafe backup, and offline solution. Not a perfect solution, but one I find workable.

   Comment by David Anderson — 8/16/2007 @ 12:00 pm

5. migration> if you add another pop3 account to be fetched into gmail the dates are ok.
   ahaa, so the import reduces into another problem, how to prepare a pop3 account with all archived mail

   i have not seen the gears option in gmail yet, but am willing to bet on its introduction in future.

   Comment by emilk — 8/16/2007 @ 1:18 pm

6. I can’t access my email unless I have my notebook with me.

   Why is that? I access my emails both from my work PC and my home PC using Thunderbird and IMAP servers, or the web frontend if I really have to.
   You can access emails on IMAP servers with a smartphone as well…

   No full-text search.

   Not true. Thunderbird lets you search the “Entire Message”: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Searching_messages
   It queries the IMAP server or the locally downloaded messages when offline. And Google Desktop works just fine for me on Windows.

   Comment by Steffen Wilberg — 8/16/2007 @ 1:26 pm

7. “Other weaknesses of Gmail are the lack of offline capabilities and the annoyingly pointless advertisements plastered all over it.”

   Would you not also be concerned about having all your email stored only on Gmail - a free service with no service commitments at all?

   Of course it’s hard to see how it would make be in their interests for the moment, but Google could post a message any time saying “We’re shutting down Gmail as of now, all your email is gone. See ya” or “As of now, there will be a charge of $50 per day for accessing Gmail”.

   Comment by Michael Lefevre — 8/16/2007 @ 1:38 pm

8. Why is that? I access my emails both from my work PC and my home PC using Thunderbird and IMAP servers, or the web frontend if I really have to.
   You can access emails on IMAP servers with a smarphone as well…

   Right now we use POP, but switching to IMAP is certainly one option.

   Not true. Thunderbird lets you search the “Entire Message”: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Searching_messages
   It queries the IMAP server or the locally downloaded messages when offline. And Google Desktop works just fine for me on Windows.

   Okay, I meant it has no indexed full text search. I can search in Thunderbird but I have thousands of mails so it takes ages. In Gmail the results are instantaneous. Like I said, I probably didn’t give Google Desktop a proper run so that’s another thing that I could probably get working if it turns out to be the way to go.

   Comment by Matt — 8/16/2007 @ 1:38 pm

9. You should switch to IMAP. It should solve your error messages, it should give you a decent back up story for your mail and if you use the right server, it should give you indexed search, too.

   I could imagine that you have confidential information in your inbox, too. Not sure if you want to share that with Google.

   Many IMAP-supporting servers come with a webmail interface these days, too. Wether you like them or not is a different question.

   I personally used to use courier, which worked for me. We’re using zimbra at moco, which has more features, or bloat, depending on how you see it.

   Comment by Axel Hecht — 8/16/2007 @ 2:40 pm

10. I’ve got Adblock installed in FireFox and I never see ads on Gmail.

    This isn’t one of your listed problems, but if you want to use Gmail and have more integration with your Mac, you can try MailPlane. No offline access there, though.

    I use Gmail and have a copy of everything in the Apple Mail.app by POP. If I desperately need something offline I can get it, and messages that I compose offline and send through gmail’s SMTP server show up in Gmail. It’s not fully functional offline, but it’s enough for me.

    I imagine Google will try to do an offline version of Gmail with Google Gears at some point, but that seems vastly more complex than their offline version of Google Reader.

    Comment by Jason — 8/16/2007 @ 4:30 pm

11. You can also always use mutt, though people seem to be tarry of terminal applications these days it offers all of the traditional features plus it’s blazingly fast, and has incredibly filtering options.

    Comment by Anders — 8/16/2007 @ 5:00 pm

12. Matt, I’ve also migrated from TB to Gmail only. From my own experience, I can recommend the MailRedirect extension to TB. Works fine with a batch of files even under TB 2.0.x. It’ll add an icon to TB’s toolbar.

    Comment by funTomas — 8/16/2007 @ 5:06 pm

13. I wish I’d known about MailRedirect before spending so much time torturing myself with that Gmail Loader monstrosity. Unfortunately it has the same problem with timestamps, despite what Lifehacker says. It predictably uses the date/time that Gmail received the mail, not the original date/time of the mail.

    Comment by Matt — 8/16/2007 @ 5:29 pm

14. In order to get conversation-like threads in Thunderbird, I changed the settings so that everything goes into the Inbox (including drafts and sent messages) and then use tags and saved searches to navigate my mail.

    Comment by Brandon — 8/16/2007 @ 5:54 pm

15. Oh, and of course I changed the view to sort by Date, Descending, Threaded.

    Comment by Brandon — 8/16/2007 @ 5:56 pm

16. IMAP is your friend. Try that first It has stars, and you can get pretty close to threads. You’ll need an external app for indexed full text search. Get a webmail front end installed on your IMAP server for times when you don’t have a client.

    The SMTP issue is your problem Get your provider to implement SMTP Auth over SSL, on the standard port and port 443 (normally HTTPS).

    Gerv

    Comment by Gerv — 8/16/2007 @ 5:59 pm

17. Most ISPs provide authenticated SMTP on port 587 nowadays, and I don’t think I’ve seen a provider yet that blocks 587 (except for the places that block everything and make you use their proxy server, etc). On the other hand, almost everyone is blocking port 25 now because of spammers.

    Comment by Dave Miller — 8/16/2007 @ 11:23 pm

18. I’ve totally switched to Gmail and Mailplane (mailplaneapp.com). I miss some of Thunderbird’s niceties, and the loss of a few year’s of Thunderbird’s email storage, but I’m much happier and much more portable in Gmail and Gmail POP on my iPhone.

    I know this might not be an option, but I decided to cut off my old email — I rarely ever looked through it — and when I needed something, well, I’d just fire up Thunderbird and look for it. Those days have long since passed though, so now I just rely on my 4 Gmail accounts.

    Comment by Chris Messina — 8/17/2007 @ 2:57 am

19. kill all the ads with customizegoogle plugin for firefox

    Comment by Lotti — 8/17/2007 @ 1:46 pm

20. I agree with the above comments - IMAP and Thunderbird are your friend!

    You can use SMTP over SSL using port 587 and use IMAP on port 443.

    It’s available wherever you are - problem solved.

    Comment by Howard — 9/5/2007 @ 4:38 pm

Trackback URL RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>