I Heart the Cloud; Goodbye Thunderbird

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Written by: Jed

Prior to a few nights ago, I was a Thunderbird fanboy. Even with Gmail coming out with new feature after new feature in their labs, I still preferred good old’ Thunderbird and its pool of extensions. Make no doubt about it, I’m a happy Gmail user, I’ve just never been a fan of using a browser to read and write emails.

Thunderbird + Gmail + IMAP + Google Contacts + Lightning + Provider for Google Calendar + MinimizeToTray = bliss.

It did everything I wanted and needed. It pushed and pulled to and from the Gmail cloud whenever I made an addition to my calendar or contacts; constantly checked for new mail in the background – all in a clean (old-fashioned) interface. It was a no frills setup that did everything I would ever do in the browser, in a convenient standalone application. Or so I thought.

One of the reasons I love Gmail, is the fact that I can forward almost every email address to it; multiple inboxes were also introduced months back. I’ve never really had a compelling reason to use these features. I really only use one address, but it’s nice to know that I wouldn’t miss any new messages sent to my old university account. What makes this feature genius, is the fact that it automatically replies from the proper address. Sure I can access and reply to my university email through my Gmail account, but my professors would be oblivious of that fact. Thunderbird doesn’t do this. It only knows of one account (the one you set up), and thus, can only send from that address. Your inbox may be getting the forwarded emails from other addresses, but you can only reply from the address of the main account. Given my rare use of the forwarding feature, this really wasn’t a big deal. But I’m a stickler for having all options available to me, so I left Thunderbird.

The main thing I lost from leaving the standalone client was “new mail” notification in the system tray. Easy solution; Google has one, creatively dubbed Google Notifier (Windows). Since I use HTTPS, I also needed this registry tweak for it to work as advertised. The program even allows “mailto” calls to open Gmail in a browser. It seems to check my inbox every 2 minutes or so, which isn’t the instant gratification I got from Thunderbird constantly running in the background, but it’s close enough. For users who actually use the chat feature within Gmail, the standalone Google Talk app does email notifications as well.

Combining Google Notifier with the offline Gmail Lab feature – I haven’t lost any of the functionality I had with Thunderbird. I guess I should continue to run Thunderbird for backing up my inbox, but I really wouldn’t mind reaching Nirvana; aka Inbox Zero.

Computing on the cloud doesn’t seem so bad after all.

After making the switch on the desktop, I discovered that the iPhone Email client suffers from the same deficiency – but of course Google has me covered.