First off, I am back to blogging after a long break!
I have been trying Mozilla Thunderbird for offical email for the past 100 days. My verdict – inadequate.
The search feature in Thumderbird is pretty bad. I was finding it very difficult to extract mails based on anything other than keyword searches in the subject field. That said, these are the features where thunderbird can do with a lot of development:
1) Rich editor. The message compostion features are rather rudimentary
2) Better color schemes: One look at Outlook 2007 and Thundebird and you know the difference!
3) Tighter integration with calendar, reminders etc..
Having said all this, Thunderbird is still a very good open source alternative for an email client.
Good to see you back to Blogging sir and also active.
After reading points on Thunderbird, whats your opinion on Gmail Offline? I know, its still painful (thankfully bearable) and that it carries all the superb features of Gmail.
gmail offline is a good alternative. But what one needs in a collaborative environment is tools that enable collaboration. Email is only aspect of this. It is in this respect Outlook has its design specs right!
Hmm…
Sir, with G getting multiple products of its offline now (Gmail, Gcal, Gdocs), can it to some extent lead to same, with an added advantage of having stuff on local system as well as on web (available both in office and office!)
I still agree, Gears Offline is still not pucca… but can the future be?
I was quite excited initially with all these new features Mail has to offer, however when the time has come (a few weeks ago) and I had to reinstall the Leopard, it was then when I realised how much hassle there is with backing up all emails. Even if all your Mail folder is backed up on your time machine – to restore all your emails will take you ages – if you like me, have large number of sub folders under your Inbox.
This was the time when I’ve realised that it’s time to switch – and I got back to the Thunderbird – which I was using earlier on the PC.
The great thing about the Thunderbird is that to backup all your emails – including the folder structures, all accounts etc. – all you need to do is to copy the folder from the Library and after you’ve reinstalled your system simply copy it back to the same location – start up Thunderbird and everything looks as it was before. This is one of the main reasons why I’m sticking to Thunderbird.