A week ago, Washington Post columnist Rob Pegoraro offered two good alternatives to using Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. The Microsoft email clients are out of date from the features perspective. My sense is that most Operation Gadget readers know enough about email clients to be able to choose one that enhances their personal productivity.
One of the things that stood out for me in this article was the attention that Rob Pegoraro pays to IMAP support in Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0:
Eudora and Thunderbird can connect to the two main types of e-mail account, the Post Office Protocol (POP) service almost every Internet provider offers and a better but harder-to-find one called Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). But each feels at home in only one of these standards. Eudora is terrific with POP but slow and clumsy with IMAP; Thunderbird’s near-peerless IMAP performance contrasts with POP support that omits a few options handy when checking one account from two computers.
I recently finished a major email server migration and converted from POP3 to IMAP accounts for managing my email. When I was using POP3, I read my email with Evolution, a Linux-based personal information manager with good email, contact management, and calendar support. I started using Evolution because my mail server didn’t have SpamAssassin running on it and Evolution integrates with a locally running instance of SpamAssassin.
Now that I’ve moved to a modern email infrastructure, I can afford to start using IMAP and keep most of my email on the server. This frees me to use any one of my desktops or laptops to read my email. It also allows me to check my mail on a handheld communicator like the Treo 650 or the H-P iPAQ h6135 as well.
Thunderbird might be the best “version 1.0” product I’ve ever used on the Internet. It handles multiple IMAP accounts with ease. Thunderbird avoids many of the “connection reset by peer” error messages that I ran into when using Evolution to manage a single IMAP mailbox. There are a few nice-to-have features missing from Thunderbird, including an in-line spelling checker and a streamlined account interface for people like me who use multiple IMAP accounts.
Rob’s column fairly compares Thunderbird and Eudora, and shows the areas where Thunderbird needs to be improved. I think the Mozilla project now has a very good email client in Thunderbird to go with its small and efficient Firefox web browser.