Back when I used to use a desktop email client, I couldn’t find anything as fast and flexible as mutt. So it was my choice for several years. Then I switched to Gmail and I’m prepared to pay a little price of lesser flexibility for all the other features. I’m not going back to desktop any time soon.

2 kOoLiNuS

B) webmail is fake mail. We have to think globally and globally free, or affordable, or quick internet connections ARE NOT a common good. Even in 6 of the 8th of the most industialized worldwide nation. So they work nice for a niche of people, but to other people ?

I see your point. And it makes webmail even a better option (I am not in the USA, and I leave outside by native country for a few years now):

- Email “dependability” is tightly related with Internet access speeds and prices. Email is not a service on its own, but a part of the broader web experience usually (am I wrong?). The more people use the web (IM, web services, etc), the more they rely on email – they get more contacts, more messages, and so on. So the more expensive/inaffordable is their Internet access, the less they use email anyway.

- Localization-wise, I have to say that webmails are usually much better done than desktop clients. Maybe because it is so much easier to improve translations of web applications (just edit a .php file usually) than desktop clients (recompile?).

- Support-wise, webmail is much easier. Maybe in the US or other “top technology” countries everyone knows how to configure an email client, but for the rest of the “regular” people it is much easier to just sign up for a web service and use web browser – something that they are already familiar with.

Anyway, this is how I see things…

What I would like is to see tagging implemented more fully into Thunderbird.

A) since the annual incomes of the Mozilla Foundations I’d like to see Thunderbird grow within it. Yes, more visibility and efforts to fill the gaps would be *really* welcome. The plain “sourceforge”-like approach scares me … I can see the project die in a million fork immediately after the launch!

B) webmail is fake mail. We have to think globally and globally free, or affordable, or quick internet connections ARE NOT a common good. Even in 6 of the 8th of the most industialized worldwide nation. So they work nice for a niche of people, but to other people ?

c) Google is an USA based company, bounded to their laws and some of them are sometimes a bit “too much” in terms of respect of the privacy of a person or a company. Would they assure me black on white the absolute privacy of “my” email I would rely completely on them … but as for now I’ll let them only manage my public mailing lists stuff. Private things on private server.

Ciao !

As it stands now, you have to read a bunch of forum posts to figure out what folders to save and where to put stuff to migrate it your mail manually.

Ugh. I don’t know anyone whose exclusively using webmail. Frankly, webmail products either a) completely suck once you get large volumes of incoming e-mail and/or b) the ones that don’t suck involve trusting third parties who don’t necessarily deserve that trust (such as Google).

I’ve used only Thunderbird since the early beta releases, and its nice to have an OS alternative when everyone around me is using Novell Groupwise and/or Outlook clients. Yuck.

I think you’re right that Outlook is the best “all in one” client out there. But why have an “all in one” client at all? I prefer having separate calendar, contacts, to-do, and email applications that can talk to each other and integrate, but any one of which is replaceable. Outlook locks you in.

On the other hand, the way OS X does it, you have separate applications that are not really separable. Mail integrates really well with iCal and Address Book, but you have to take them as a whole. So who knows.

The writing is on the wall, and the good folks that ran this project know it.

Outlook still has its place in the corporate setting, but for the vast majority of people, gmail, yahoo and hotmail is enough, so Thunderbird (as good as it is), will never get traction against outlook.

Sure, there are some disadvantages against webmail, but the advantages are pretty compelling:
* Available anywhere you go
* Consolidate all your mail into one place (gmail, yahoo)
* Managed and updated by someone else

I can tell you, as a small business owner, I used to run my own mail server. No more. This is just one of those pieces that is ripe for outsourcing, whether to a party like webmail.us, or gmail. Its just not worth the headache.

What’s holding me to Thunderbird over Mail is its speed and identities. I filter email addressed to multiple email addresses through one address. Thunderbird handles that best.

The bigger question Mitchell’s call to action has brought up is the question of whether or not email is dead. You can’t declare extinct something the average world didn’t even know was sick. Yes, the web-enlightened crowd we speak to has moved on. But there are still millions of people using Outlook Express or Mail with their @comcast.net or @verizon.net or @earthlink.net addresses who would say different. And let’s not even get started on business users, big and small. I simply can’t see my co-workers, as an example, giving up desktop clients any time this century.

As long as Microsoft and Apple continue to include half-baked email applications with their operating systems, I think there will be room for something like Thunderbird to do it better.

P.S. The latest version did fix some problems with fonts, but still, they are nowhere as pretty “out-of-the-box” as in Mail or Entourage.

Thunderbird’s biggest stumbling block for me is the calendar integration (or lack thereof) currently. As a small business, we’re looking heavily into Zimbra to see what’s on the horizon in the hopes of whittling our Microsoft dependence down a little further.

At the moment it’s on one line and if I am working off a smaller screen it looks dumb.

Also Secure RSS support would be nice.

Seriously, this is all that’s holding me back!