First there was Pine and then Eudora and later The Bat. Then there was mutt and Thunderbird. Somewhere in there was a brief stint with Evolution. Then came travel and IMAP and dead laptops and new desktops and again, a change of scene. After a couple of weeks of toying with other mail apps, I'm headed back to Thunderbird. Here's why:
Gmail
I've spent a fair amount of time in the Gmail web interface over the last few months. I've got the hang of labeling instead of sorting, and although multiple labels is cool, it turns out that I still think in folders, not by tags when it comes to emails. Part of the reason for this is the desire to do a physical and visual "domain switch" when I change projects. Just like spinning the prayer wheel, I need a physical action (selecting a folder) to create a visual set of related and relevant emails (not conversations) to orient myself according to the task that I am about to perform. This is not the metaphor that Gmail uses.
In addition to this fundamental difference in how Gmail's UI works vs. how my brain works, here are a few other pain points I've run across:
- While I do find the interface easy to use, my mail tool occasionally doubles as my TODO list. Having the Gmail labels at the bottom of the stack on the left side makes context switching more difficult. In other words: I like to have the list of projects that I am NOT currently working on.
- Within Gmail labels there does not appear to be an easy way to sort the emails by "column." By default the newest email is at the top.This is simply not the way I like my email to be sorted. 14 years of "old at top" is a very hard habit to break, sorry Gmail.
- Gmail lost a good portion of my email when I opted to empty my trash. Because it sorts things by "conversation" instead of individual emails. When I emptied the trash, any conversation that had a single email in the trash can got entirely deleted. This was unexpected.
Overall I quite like Gmail as a Web app. Now that I'm using IMAP instead of POP, it's pretty much super-fantastic as email gets properly synced (sort of, see above re. Trash) if I'm switching machines.
Evolution
Next up is the default mail client for Ubuntu. I haven't used it in years and thought I might as well give it another shake. I'm still looking for a nice calendar option that I don't need to go out of my way to use. I gave Gmail a try, but without the use of the Google "home" page there's no easy way to be forced to look at the calendar without actually going to look at the calendar. I thought Evolution might fix this for me, so I gave it a shot.
To be fair, I've only given Evolution a couple of days, but I'm already bailing back to Thunderbird. Here's what I liked about Evolution though:
- Very easy to migrate contacts from Gmail back to Evolution
-
Syncs the entire set Gmail folders (including "Archive").
- has the integrated calendar
- Can easily send re-sized photos from F-stop to my contacts.
Now for the things I don't like:
- Nag window when checking for mail.
- Entire of all folders are scanned when looking for new mail (including "Archive")
- No option to re-wrap an entire email that isn't properly formatted (control-E in Thunderbird; Edit menu has "re-wrap email" option in Thunderbird; although there is control-K in Evolution but it seems to be per-line).
- No obvious way to "minimize" the email details (the pane between the list of emails in the folder and the email you are currently viewing).
- No obvious way to "show images" for the email I am currently viewing (I have a few mailing lists that I do want to see images for)
- No obvious way to list attachments towards the top of the email (instead I have to scroll past 1,097 top-posted messages)
Ultimately I think Evolution could be a winner for me, but there are too many little details that I quite like about Thunderbird.
For now I'm going to switch back to Thunderbird and will be giving Lightening a try for calendaring. But I'll also be keeping an eye on Evolution just in case some of my pain points get resolved in future releases.
PS I can't create new calendar events in Lightening (even though I've restarted Thunderbird). Um. RLY? This should work flawlessly without me thinking about it. Am I doing something wrong, is Jaunty doing something wrong? or does it simply not actually work?
I think you should give
I think you should give GMail another chance using some of the labs features. I enable the calendar and docs in the GMail interface, then put the labels and contacts on the right side. Google's original vision was a delete-less system. With the storage you've got, there's not really much of a reason to delete. GMail also has a (limited) task manager now which has categories which I use for different projects. Converting an e-mail to a task automatically links back to the task.
Once GMail gets real integration with Docs and Calendar, I'll probably never use anything else.
You can delete individual
You can delete individual emails in Gmail without deleting the entire conversation. You probably clicked the Delete button at the top or bottom of the entire thread. You have to click the drop down menu in the top right corner of the individual email (it says "Reply" to start with) and then click "Delete this message"
I "accidentally" delete
I "accidentally" delete things in gmail like that *all the time*. (I put it in quotes because to me, this is really a UI issue.) Drives me bananas.
hi there nice sunday all For
hi there nice sunday all
For me the best on gmail is,the low spam quota
i use my e mail adress on many places round the web
but only few spam mails in the last half year
evolution works fine for me,better than thunderbird or Apple mac os x mail
ok i only use pop
like the old skool working ;)
i not need that shit of web2 round the web of the mobile phone generation ;)))
greetings from southwest germany
guido
The REAL Question is if 99%
The REAL Question is if 99% of the Linux users switch to Thunderbird or Gmail (because of several small and not so small issues with Evolution). Why Gnome still insist on Evolution and more important why ubuntu insist on Evolution.
Don't get me wrong I'm all for a plethora of options, but I also want a working system and some long-term coherence.
99% eh? Where did you get
99% eh? Where did you get that figure? Wait ... sniff, sniff ... I think I know.
Evolution is the only thing remotely close to MS Outlook.
"No obvious way to "show
"No obvious way to "show images" for the email I am currently viewing (I have a fe mailing lists that I do want to see images for)"
[ctrl]+[i].
I used Thunderbird, then went to evolution, then back to thunderbird and recently started using evolution again. I think both are far from perfect, although I'm not able to define perfect either. I've had more issues with evolution than with thunderbird, however right now I've got the feeling that everything (yes everything, not just a large subset of everything) I use integrates better with evolution.
Also, it would be nice to actually do PIM stuff on my computer again, right now I only manage contacts using google contacts and I don't do calendars. The only time I actually did do this was when using a Mac, and I quite liked it at the time. I think PIM is very related to E-mail, so before any mail client is perfect it should be able to do PIM very well, or integrate with a decent PIM solution very well, which I think most clients lack right now.
Your blog ate my keyboard
Your blog ate my keyboard shortcut (shouldn't have used something that your blog could wrongfully interpred as markup I guess), so here it is again:
"No obvious way to "show images" for the email I am currently viewing (I have a fe mailing lists that I do want to see images for)"
ctrl+i.
I replaced the < tags > with
I replaced the < tags > with [ square ] brackets. :)
Try Kontact. It lets you
Try Kontact. It lets you set what folder is trash, per account, so you can hit the Del key and it'll send the mail to GMail's trash instead of just archiving it (what Evolution does). And it has a bottom pane so you can just click on the attachments instead of scrolling to the end. The calendar integration is wonderful. I got an event invite, hit accept, and it went straight into my calendar. It was like I was using OSX or something O_O
A very well-written post
A very well-written post that gets my full ACK: Thunderbird plus Gmail via IMAP is the very best of several worlds for me too.
I didn't know about the rewrap option in Thunderbird. Thanks for the tip, this may come in very handy at times. However, the Ctrl+E shortcut doesn't work for me. There's a Rewrap option in the Edit Menu of the Compose window, but it doesn't have any keyboard shortcut assigned to it at all. I'm using Thunderbird 2 in Jaunty. Strange. Could be it's a new thing in Thunderbird 3. I'll check that out sometime.
Oops! You're absolutely
Oops! You're absolutely right! Control-E in Thunderbird is "send again" from the Sent folder. I've corrected the post.
I currently use Evolution
I currently use Evolution with Gmail's IMAP provider
One note that you may want to look into is a gmail Labs feature called "Advanced IMAP Controls". It allows you to disable specific labels from being exported as folders when using IMAP (I filter All Mail/Archive, and some others).
I also use offlineimap and set Evo to access the maildir it creates. This allows some nice features like renaming folders (I remove all the [GMAIL] prefixes). Though it does cause an issue where new mail arrives, but evo does not see it unless I restart. A bug to look at on another day..
I look forward to hearing more about your experiences with Lightning.
I should say "Sometimes evo
I should say "Sometimes evo does not see it". I haven't narrowed it down yet.
To quote Michael Elkins
To quote Michael Elkins (author of mutt), "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."
I use Gmail via Google Apps at work, mutt at home, and I have used and trained people to use Thunderbird and Lightning. I am not happy with any of them, but I do like tagging rather than foldering my email a la Gmail, but the speed and ease of email with mutt makes me very untempted to try anything else. Also, until Gmail includes grown-up encryption (which they will never be able to do, because of export restrictions), it will always be a bit of a toy.