I’m a big fan of Google services – search, blog search, finance, news and images. But until recently, I was only a quasi-GMail user, mostly because I didn’t want to commit all my e-mail to a third-party service supplier.
As a result, I was using Thunderbird. It was an unorthodox decision because it’s not like Thunderbird plays as nice as other e-mail clients such as Outlook and Entourage. But as an ardent Firefox user, it seemed to make sense to support Mozilla’s e-mail efforts.
Unfortunately, my faith in Thunderbird has gone unrewarded. As much as Firefox has become a vibrant and useful tool, Thunderbird has been stagnant. Firefox has an amazing add-on ecosystem, while Thunderbird’s is almost non-existent. Firefox plays nice with all kinds of other technologies; Thunderbird not so much, including my Blackberry.
Meanwhile, GMail continues to push forward with some cool new wrinkles such as video chat and themes. There’s also an interesting group of companies developing GMail extensions such as Xoopit.
So, I finally took the GMail plunge by making it an e-mail portal for my professional and e-mail accounts. With the help of labels, it’s looks and acts really organized even with thousands of e-mail sitting in the inbox.
It is interesting that Mozilla has dropped the ball when it comes to Thunderbird. It wasn’t until recently that Mozilla gave Thunderbird some much-needed love by spinning it out and providing it with $3-million in start-up financing.
The problem is that it may be a case of too little, too late – at least for me.
Technorati Tags: gmail, thunderbird
9 Comments
Wise decision. I stopped using Thunderbird for about a year ago and started using Gmail instead and I don’t regret this so far. My ultimate goal is to exchange all of my local applications for web applications.
I have had good results so far with forwarding several email accounts into Gmail. However, I was hesitant to do the same with my “real” email account, and use Thunderbird for that. (I can’t port my Hotmail account into Gmail even if I wanted to, but that’s a different story.)
But I’m inspired now and might have to make Gmail my one-stop shop for email.
This is JK, founder of Xoopit. Thanks for the shoutout! Always feel free to hit us up with suggestions and feature requests.
I’ve also been relying only on Gmail to handle my other accounts for about 2 years now (my school email, and my gmail itself). Only snag I ran into is that if I email someone else at my school’s domain it often ends up in their spam quarantine because a lot of people are using Gmail accounts for spamming so the filter either blocks all incoming Gmails, or blocks ones where the return address is a school-domain address (which I often use) since it can look like a spoof.
Funny you say how you are a big fan of Google since over the last year you have been asking if such and such a program is the next “Google Slayer” several times. You appeared to be very anti-google at one point and seemed to be turning away from them.
JonJon,
Let’s just say I have a love-hate relationship with Google.
The “problem” with Google is their services are so good, which is a good and bad thing if you’re looking for a diversity of suppliers. Google sets a high benchmark, which can only be a good thing if you want to break into the market. The tough part is overcoming that benchmark.
Good luck and welcome to the club
I went full circle with Outlook and Thunderbird and came all the way back to Gmail when GAFYD came along. With the add-ons I’m using and system I’ve gotten into I just can’t imagine living without it.
I have tried Thunderbird as well. I just never liked it, but I prefer desktop clients. I found that KMail inside of Kontact works wonderfully for me. You should give that a try sometime too.
In my point of view thunder bird is better than outlook but Gmail is the best in online. I am giving some extra features of Gmail
Gmail has extra feautres like offline chat and mobile applications,rply by chat etc.So it is the best.