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Why Desktop Email Still Trumps Webmail
p3net writes "Shortly before the release of Thunderbird 2.0 RC1, Wired held an interesting interview with Scott MacGregor, the lead developer of Thunderbird. He presents some views as to why desktop email clients still triumph, even in this much-dominated web age. 'Some users want to have their data local for privacy and control. Furthermore, you can integrate data from different applications on the desktop in ways that you can't do with web-based solutions, unless you stick to web solutions from a single provider. For example, you can use your Outlook address book with Thunderbird. We'd like to continue to expand the kinds of data you can share between Thunderbird and other apps (both web and desktop applications).'"
I haven't tried it yet - I've been using Sunbird - but the additional features that lightning provides will help Thunderbird on the road to becoming a more complete Microsoft Outlook competitor. If only we could convince someone to write the Exchange competitor on an open database...
From the Sunbird / Lightning page http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightnin
You may prefer Mozilla Sunbird if...
you prefer your calendar to be separate from your email client
you don't currently use Mozilla Thunderbird for your email
you don't like adding add-ons [such as extensions or themes] to your applications
You may prefer Lightning if...
you send or receive meeting invitations via email
you already use Mozilla Thunderbird for email
you customize your applications with add-ons [such as extensions or themes] You can follow the Mozilla Calendar Weblog here >> http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar/
Generally speaking, desktop based applications will have more features and better integration, but web based applications have the advantage of being portable, not to mention they're (generally) easier to upgrade for multiple users.
I was a huge advocate for these types of programs... Then Gmail came out. I rationalized sticking with them in that I didn't want Google reading my email. Then I started using Zimbra. It doesn't make sense to have thick clients anymore, when the web apps can do everything that the desktop apps can, and there is a solid open source program for hosting it yourself.
The Zimbra guys even have connectors for Evolution and Exchange if you want to stick with thick desktop apps, but if there is one thing Gmail has proven is that users are willing to give up functionality for remote accessibility, and with Zimbra, they don't even have to do that.
You can integrate tightly with desktop emails. But most web based solution do pretty good virus scan and pretty good junk filtering.
Didn't we already see this?
More to the point: desktop applications are inherently preferable to the individual user. The argument can be made that a corporate environment, in which more than twenty people may need to use a program with limited seats in a license, or in which more than five people need to work collaboratively on the same data set, a client-server type may be more appropriate. Webapps are a client-server type of application in which the client is the web browser and the server is the application running within the web server. Viewing it as such may help to expose the odd nature of allowing so many middle layers to persist.
Desktop apps are important not only for security but also for efficiency and to prevent the gratuitous overconsumption of network resources.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
I like gmail and use it almost exclusivly now.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
There are things in Gmail I've never seen anywhere else. For example, if there is an address in an email you receive, Gmail automatically creates a link to map the address with googlemaps. That's the kind of kickass idea that something like Outlook would never have.
Hah, you crazy kids with your aa-fonts and images. Terminal based MUAs still dominate my world - and I'm not interested in changing.
But on the other hand Webmail is catching up when you consider some of the features of G-Mail.
Gmail has the distinct advantage of being both web accessible while at the same time also accessible via any pop3 e-mail client.
Sort of a "cake and eat it too" scenario.
I currently use Thunderbird to keep track of the 4 accounts that my wife and I use. I also have the ability to access my mail online should I not have my laptop with me. I also have the ability to use GMail as an offsite backup of my mail should I ever have a total OS crash and need to reinstall. The large amount of storage on the gmail servers plus the ability to re-download anything stored on the gmail servers means that I can restore my local copy of my emails.
If more webmail sites used gmail's strategy, webmail would likely catch up to pop3 and possibly surpass it
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
I *hate* webmail. There have been lots of times where replies get hung and then lost, with no draft saved, because of my internet connection. Not to mention the slowness and clunky interfaces. So I'm sticking with good old reliable Pine.
One of the main things I don't like about web mail is I've not seen one that lets me just drag a file or picture right into the message pane. If I want to email 8 pictures to someone, I normally have to click "add file," locate it, then do that 8 times (and many make me upload them one at a time as well, so that takes even longer). Another thing is the ability to get all 5 of my email accounts at once, instead of having to log into 5 different web pages.
The discussion about local e-mail clients vs. web clients is similar to discussions about digital cameras and pistols.
.45 will do the job, it has _stopping power_." There will usually be folks on the other side who say "Those are nice, but I prefer a .22 Pistol. It's small enough that I'm much more likely to actually have it on me if something happens in public. A heavy, bulky gun that's sitting on the dresser is much less useful to me when I'm in danger than a small .22 that I can carry every day."
When talking about cameras to buy, some folks advocate SLR, expandable, large cameras that have huge optical zoom, attachment points, and a huge slew of features. Other folks will say "I'll take an Elph" (or some other small format, quality camera that's the size of a pack of cigarettes. The most common argument the big camera people will use is something to the effect of 'yes, but you're sacrificing 20% image quality' (or something along those lines. A common response? "Sure, but I'm about X times more likely to actually HAVE the camera on me when something interesting happens. A big camera that takes slightly better pictures that's at home is less useful to me than this."
Concealed pistol arguments have both sides too. "I prefer the 9MM Glock" or "Nothing less than a
E-Mail clients seem to be heading in the same direction. T-Bird has some great features and rationales for using. It does stuff that can only really be done from a fixed location (private mail, etc), and yes, it can integrate with desktop apps. But... I rarely use those extra features. I've switched to webmail knowing that I'm trading off some features, but the payoff of being able to actually GET to it wherever I am has paid off many more times than not having integration into MS Word or something.
Different audiences, different needs, but both sides have their reasons.
Soon webmail will be as integrated with the desktop as Internet Explorer is with Windows. When that happens, we will create a hack to rip it out, just like IE
What?
For example, you can use your Outlook address book with Thunderbird.
And Outlook also works with just about any mass mailing worm, virus, or trojan out there!
I'd like to see you try that with a web client!
Nope, I'm stickin' with Outlook.
That's the main reason I like using Apple's mail.app. I can write emails when I'm somewhere where I don't have an Internet connection and then send them later when I do. Also, if you're somewhere with a slow connection, it only affects the sending and receiving, whereas, in my experience, a slow connection affects all of the navigating through messages and almost everything else you might do with Web mail.
Graphically, I also think most clients are nicer to look at. That may not be that important to most people, but it is to me.
That said, I like that I have the option of using Web mail when I'm near someone else's computer. (Ideally, I think I'd use IMAP so that my folders, etc. from my client would match the ones I see when I log on using the Web. I've actually been looking for a provider that offers IMAP where I could also transfer my domains so I'd still have everything in one place. I'm also looking for a price that would be competitive with GoDaddy, who currently handles my email and domains.)
I'm just sayin'.
Thunderbird won't be replacing Outlook for me until they figure out that not everybody wants the reply to show up underneath the original message. I've tried to switch twice because IMAP support sucks in Outlook, but I can't stand paging down through 5 screens to get the most recent comment on an email that has gone back and forth. Hey guys, how about a configuration option?
You guys would be really impressed with the insightful comment that I made about this in my desktop version of /.
I would tell you about it, but I would just be repeating myself.
+5 Insightful
-5 Lonely bastard
The problem with Outlook replacement solutions is that they all tend to use similar licensing model as Microsoft, even their pricing is close. Unless your Chief.x.x really hates Microsoft for some reason, nobody will want to deviate from the "corporate industry standard", "the safe bet" especially if it's not seemlessly integrated with Blackberry.
e-mail isn't a problem, it's a protocol. It doesn't need solutions, it needs implementations. What's next, frozen waffle solutions for my toaster?
While Thunderbird may be more feature laden and easier to modify than Outlook. There's only one problem, Exchange Servers. Unless your friendly Exchange admin has enabled POP or IMAP forget about getting your email on these programs without Outlook. Until MS opens up on their MAPI protocol it will be nearly impossible to connect with these clients. As we all know, enterprise adoption is the key to success.
Mozilla: Why Desktop E-Mail Crucifies the Browser
.Mac. We plan to add more web-mail services and even ISP providers in future releases. In the meantime, it's possible for developers to write extensions for other popular web e-mail providers.
Scott Gilbertson Email 04.09.07 | 2:00 AM
In an era when applications are moving into the web browser, the maker of the world's most popular open-source e-mail client wants you to stay on the desktop.
Later this month, Mozilla will release Thunderbird 2, the latest version of its cross-platform e-mail application. The current version, 1.5, has almost 50 million users worldwide and has been translated into 35 languages. Built on the same technology as Mozilla's Firefox browser, it is loved by many for its advanced filtering features and junk-mail-battling tools, an integrated RSS news reader and the ability to customize with tons of add-ons.
But with popular web-based e-mail services from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, which just announced that it will offer unlimited storage, the need for a desktop e-mail client seems to be fading.
So we asked Scott MacGregor, Thunderbird's lead engineer, why anyone needs Thunderbird these days, and he had a pretty good answer. He also talked about Mozilla's open-source development model and told us what new features to expect when Thunderbird 2 becomes available.
Wired News: With seemingly every aspect of our data moving toward online apps and away from the traditional desktop model, why is Mozilla still interested in a desktop e-mail client?
Scott MacGregor: We believe the Thunderbird experience is better for moderate to heavy e-mail use. It's much easier to process incoming mail -- anyone who's had to use web mail on vacation to deal with dozens of e-mails can testify to how tedious it can be.
WN: What advantages does Thunderbird offer that a web-based app like Gmail doesn't?
MacGregor: Some users want to have their data local for privacy and control. Furthermore, you can integrate data from different applications on the desktop in ways that you can't do with web-based solutions, unless you stick to web solutions from a single provider. For example, you can use your Outlook address book with Thunderbird. We'd like to continue to expand the kinds of data you can share between Thunderbird and other apps (both web and desktop applications).
WN: Speaking of which, Thunderbird 2 has some new integrated web-mail functionality. How does that work?
MacGregor: A lot of users want to check their web-mail accounts using a desktop client, but they don't know all the information necessary to connect. For instance, with Gmail you need to know the server names in addition to your login information. We wanted to make the process easier for users, so we've provided Gmail integration using just an e-mail address. All the user has to do is enter their e-mail address and password and Thunderbird will figure out the server details for them.
For the Mac version, we've provided the same one-step integration with
WN: Mozilla touts the "open-source security" model as one of Thunderbird's strengths. Why is open-source security better than a proprietary solution?
MacGregor: One of the great things about open source is that you have the entire community, thousands of users, looking to find flaws and vulnerabilities in Thunderbird. And when they do, we have what I call the security SWAT team -- people who are always watching for reports of vulnerabilities and helping to patch them. The open-source model allows us to find problems faster, correct them faster and get updates out to users.
WN: What are some of the key features in the new version of Thunderbird?
MacGregor: People still get too much e-mail to easily sort, so we've focused on ways to better manage your inbox. The new mail alerts feature makes it easy to see new mail without having to stop what you're doing and change applications. (Editor's note: This feature is only available in Windows and
Would you use a phone service if you knew all of your phone calls could exist on an internet connected computer indefinitely for some geek hacker to browse through and maybe post on YouTube?
Even worse, email (which takes up considerably less space and can be compressed to single digit percentages) is prime for third parties to resell to marketing and collection companies. They can mine the data to figure out what books you've ordered from amazon and barnes and noble. Determine which political internet sites or newsgroups you subscribe to. Analyze your buying habits. Mine for personal information to resell to identity thieves for a profit. It may make you feel good to trust that you abide by the law and have nothing to hide; but not everyone does the same. Seemingly innocuous information can be used for evil purposes like identity theft or political descrimination.
Databases, like every technology devised by man, can be utilized for good or ill. Your right to privacy is a valuable part of your ability to persue happiness undeterred. Don't let big corporations or the government take that away without a fight.
jrentona
Beverly, MA
I host my own personal mail and use horde exclusively - at work I use Outlook because I need considerably more horsepower than a web client is able to give me.
.psts for the string 'digital sender' in a bit more than half a second. 709 hits that I can browse because the word order number is in the subject line.
Today I had to pull page counts from ten HP 0299c digital senders and the scanners IP addresses were spread out through ten different work orders - using an outlook plugin called Lookout (this company was eaten by Microsoft but you can still find the plugin if you look around) I was able to search a bit less than 4gb of email archive in two different
You'd play hell doing that with a webmail client.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
I have a camera on my cell, a digital SLR plus I have web, imaps and local (SSH) access to mail.
Unfortunately I'm stuck with the one gigantic penis.
They say you can't have everything in life, but I'm really not complaining and neither is my girl.
Add to the list one thing: sorting. No matter how Google would like to claim that Search is better than Sort, it isn't. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for, you're doomed. Was the email from John/James/Juhn ? How do you search for something so vague?
While desktop client allows you to easily re-order inbox, and then filter out with flexible searches.
Plus the regular advantages of offline storage, better security, integration with other applications (though new Google agents allow integration where sending email from an app results in a web browser window being opened)
For all I know the desktop email app should be compared with Yahoo Mail Beta. But being online is still slower. And, in some cases, extremely expensive (for example when you only have access to cellphone-based internet connection with no unlimited tethering -- I was in this situation while being in Europe, prepaid plan charged per KB and easy Gmail session on a laptop can cost about 15 Euros)
Hyperom.com
I like to take the "best of both worlds" approach. At home I use Thunderbird with IMAP. I also have a webmail client for the same account. The same mail is accessbile in both locations, including all folders, sent items, trash, etc. I can also make local copies or use folders offline if needed while using Thunderbird. The only thing that I can't do is sync the address book (which would be very useful!)
I much prefer to use Thunderbird for most of my mail usage, but webmail isn't that far off. I use RoundCube webmail (disclaimer: I help out on the project, so I may be biased) it has drag-n-drop message management, a nice look, and is generally useful. It's still quite beta but it's not so buggy it keeps people from using it on a daily basis.
I'd say IMAP+Thunderbird+Webmail is ideal for me, but it may not be an option for some people.
I dunno, I just see desktop apps are an over complication for me, thus Desktop Email has never Trump Webmail for me... Webmail is just more portable for me, I only need portable firefox and no portable thunderbird...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Cuz people are morons.. their attitudes will change in time. Sure I love security and all that as much as the next guy, but also having my stuff online allows me to access my data from anywhere, it's pretty much guaranteed to be backed up, and I can get to it on my laptop, cell phone, my friend's computers.. etc etc etc.. No more days of "oh crap I left that email at home!" and then connecting remotely if you're lucky.. My cell is my lifeline.
You might want to have a look at fastmail.fm. Excellent imap provider and they also do webdav. Just point the mail bit of your domain (cname, dns something like that, check the faq) and you're done.
Gmail/domain apps does the job for one user, if you share a company mailbox with others IMAP is the way to go.
For some things it is worth paying.
My (admittedly small) company recently carried out a survey of which mail client our users preferred from Outlook, Thunderbird and Gmail. Gmail won almost universally. I also use it happily at home to manage the 8 or so email accounts I have personally to access.
Really. all the major mail clients piss me off in different ways.
Thunderbird - where is my ability to point Thunderbird at two or three address books simultaneously? Still way behind the times when it comes to cross-account integration. You can only add ONE remote address book, and it HAS to be LDAP. No remote VCARD address book support. Just starting to get on board with multiple remote calenders.
Also - why the hell is there not a white-list for SSL certs? I KNOW my mail server has an untrusted self-signed cert. Frankly I don't give a fuck -it's my server I trust it, all I care is that it's encrypted. So Why do you have to pop up an annoying SSL cert dialog every freaking time I start up? Every other mail client on the planet allows me to accep tthis dialog once and NOT PROMPT ME AGAIN.
Outlook 2007 - WHY THE HELL DO YOU NOT HAVE PROPER THREADING YET. It's been 6+ years since this feature was available in all the open source clients. You'd think a billion dollar company could pull it off.
However, much better than thunderbird now when it comes to multiple accounts and calenders and address books. Supports a crapload of formats for both. Still not as good as KMail in this area, but a close second.
KMail - Stop crashing on me already. Also get HTML composer support in order, this is 2007 now you're like 4 years behind the times. As well, why can't I work in one folder while another account loading? There is no need to put this stupid wait screen up over the whole message area. However - nice work on the multitiude of calender and address book formats. If only exchange calenders worked properly.
I am starting to think I need to fork my own client off to get the functionality I need.
You can integrate tightly with desktop emails. But most web based solution do pretty good virus scan and pretty good junk filtering.
No reason you can't do that on the server, and then insert headers that are recognized and processed by the desktop client. It's just a matter of standardizing the headers.
Many ISPs run all incoming email through a spam filter and rank it; it's pretty trivial to insert a rule (if you have a MUA that supports processing incoming mail according to rules) to put all the ISP-flagged messages into a Spam box, or raise its "spamminess" when analyzing it locally.
Similarly, a lot of antivirus stuff gets applied at the server level these days, and while personally I find it annoying that my mailserver would ever strip off a file for any reason, when it does, it's functionally equivalent to most webmail systems. AFAIK, most Webmail systems actually integrate with MTAs that do the virus and spam-scanning themselves; the "webmail" interfaces (at least last time I looked into them) pretty much just replicate a typical MUA. You just don't see a distinction so it seems more integrated.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What a sucky design that would be.
A client which integrates a directory, calendaring, todo, email and nntp with SyncML using open and standardised protocols sure. But we can do all that already with existing server systems.
Deleted
For example, you can use your Outlook address book with Thunderbird.
Intellisync for Yahoo lets you synchronize your Yahoo webmail address book with Outlook and your PDA. Works great for me. Also syncs calendar, todo, and notepad.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
It's just faster. A piece of software running locally will always be faster (unless you're running Windows on a 386). When I tag mail as junk, I don't have to wait for my page to reload. It may be only 1 second on Yahoo on average, but it just does it right away in my mail client. Same thing when I switch from inbox to outbox. The only problem I get is that I'm not able to check my e-mail outside with my POP3 only account. Thankfully, all my other accounts also support a web interface to fall back on.
Deleted
I've gone and split my mailbox somewhat to have some attachments sent to a imap mailbox to get them on my actual desktop, leaving a copy in my regular mailbox that I can access via mutt. For better or worse, i get 1500-4k messages a day. None of these other clients i've found let me manage this in a reasonable way. So split mailbox it is. Having my thunderbird or mail.app fetch those word and ppt files we get limits the need to scp/sftp quite so much.
I need a better (graphical) mail client. Disk space (message caching) is not an issue. Getting good interactive performance of the mailbox is. If that means keeping a 1g mailbox in ram for speed, i'll buy the ram. I personally need something better. Then again, i may be one of those 99.9% users. Mutt seems to work well enough for me. If I ran it on my desktop, the attachments would work better i'm sure, but there seems to be no perfect solution, or something usable for me.
Big risk at being modded down, but I have to say it...
I have tried MANY times to use Thunderbird. Every time it fails for some weird quirk or another. The profile mechanism just doesn't work properly. It never stores the profile where i want without a whole bunch of fussing with a special start of Thunderbird (thunderbird -profile or something). Then, when I migrate my email into Thunderbird, it just cant handle huge volumes RELIABLY each time I have tried. Sometimes it imports, but invariably it fails afterwards in terms of speed or just disappearing the inbox -- which leads to the oh so helpful fix people point to about restoring the profiles.
So I am glad he has his opinions on email. But with all the issues with Thunderbird I think he should try to make that application must easier to manage (note, I didn't say "use") and less time on interviews IMHO. Oh, and please don't reply with "Oh, I have a 10k message inbox and it works fine for me." I know, many of you have no problems but if you google thunderbird you will see my own experience is not rare.
I was forced to give up using Thunderbird at work, because some people I started working with elsewhere in the organisation relied on Exchange+Outlook calendaring facilities. In other words, I ought to be a prime target for Lightning. I'm also a geek who understands more than a pretty UI about what's involved with actually doing this.
What do I see at the top of the lightning page?
Do you know how many of those I care about at work? Exactly none. And neither does pretty much anyone else in the target market for this product.
What I do care about is how well it integrates with Exchange Server, and whether its notifications for meetings and such are compatible with the business standard Exchange+Outlook combination. However, the word "Exchange" does not appear anywhere on the product home page; nor does "Outlook".
In other words, either their web page is terrible, or this isn't even close to making Thunderbird into a serious Outlook competitor. Given that the current version of Lightning is 0.3.1 (as in, starting with "0.") I'm going to go with the not-even-close version, and so it just about everyone else.
I'm afraid TFA was much the same: yet more of the popular "many eyes make secure software myth" (seriously, are we still peddling that nonsense?) and more cries about the greatness of Thunderbird due to its extensibility (does anyone reading this actually use Thunderbird with any extensions, never mind the natural way they are routinely used by Firefox users?).
Sorry to be so negative. I'm grateful to those who spend their time writing Thunderbird and giving it away to others, I really am. But it's starting to suffer from the two major diseases of the OSS world: a mistaken belief that users care more about philosophy than functionality, and a mistaken belief that OSS is somehow immune to the normal problems with software development just because some of its popular applications haven't (yet) been compromised as badly as the mainstream commercial players. I like the product, but until its marketing stops talking crap, I'm going to criticise the marketing.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Folks who go to the trouble of carrying a gun every day should at least go to a little more trouble to carry an adequate gun. Even the .380 Kel-tec P3AT can fit in a jeans pocket without bulging.
Yahoo Mail has served as my email provider for about 7 years now... I see no reason to switch back to a desktop client anytime soon.
I can throw as many stones as I wish; my house is made of transparent aluminum.
...when you can have both?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
It's nice how they have no counterpoints about the advantages webmail holds. Oh well, I guess they can only book one email-related interview a month.
Gun and camera analogies on slashdot? Come on. Only a good car analogy will do. Mini Cooper versus Mack truck. There ya go.
This is my primary objection too. However, I've recently come to the realization that most of the people I email on a regular basis use gmail, so google's already archiving at least 1/2 of my correspondence even though I don't even use their web mail service! :(
Maybe I should just give in and use gmail.
If you really need to stop someone (like someone trying to kill you), the size of the bullet really doesn't matter. just shoot them in the head.
.22 should be a enough for you to get away.
However for most common purposes (if someone is trying to mug you), putting one in the foot/leg with a
FTA
Some users want to have their data local for privacy and control.
I can think of many reasons to use a desktop mail client. Some of them are actually good reasons. But this one is completely ridiculous. Email is not private. If he had said "Some users want to have their email local so that they can decrypt and encrypt it with GnuPG," that would have been an understandable statement. But plain text email is not private, under any circumstance, ever, any more than a postcard with plain text is private!
I hope people are not using desktop email thinking it is more private. A false sense of security is worse than no security!
Penny - plain text accounting
How many local clients have major XSS issues?
.Mac, Gmail, or Hotmail can get re-rendering my messages.
Oh, that's right. None. It's not a concern. How many have attempted to send HTML/CSS emails and have had to work around the mangling that webmails do?
Yes, security is a primary concern, but I'd rather work in an environment where I don't have to deal with phishing. I'll deal with Outlook 2007 murdering my CSS with the Word engine later; it's still preferable to how horrendous
Never attribute to Hanlon that which can be adequately attributed to Heinlein.
Concealed pistol arguments have both sides too. "I prefer the 9MM Glock" or "Nothing less than a .45 will do the job, it has _stopping power_."
/. readers are tech savvy enough to know that a Glock 20 or 29 (10mm) is the handgun to have if you only have one...
Of course,
Gmail is nice in that one can use it with a POP3 client if one wants to do so. I used to use Eudora as my mailreader, but Gmail is so fast and convenient that I just stopped using Eudora, despite the extra functionality it offers. I've never seen any reason to use Thunderbird although I'll take another look at it; this thread having piqued my curiosity about it.
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
Why not just use a combination. I have IMAP on my server so on my desktop I run a desktop email program (Evolution), when I am at another computer I use squirrelmail or SSH to the server and use mutt or when I art near a computer I check email on my smart phone. Thanks to IMAP they are all syncronized at all times.
Visit http://www.crunzh.com/ for free software. Mac/Lin/Win
> Even the .380 Kel-tec P3AT can fit in a jeans pocket without bulging
I can't count the number of times my cell phone has randomly dialed someone or gone into the web browser simply from being leaned on in my pocket. And that's with the 'safety' (keypad lock) on.
If my cell phone had been a gun, I'd be sporting some stigmata by now.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I use thunderbird and gmail, download the messages and keep a copy online. That's been extremely useful because I had to work at a location that had no broadband nor wireless and a phone connection was seldom available. And I had to use data sent over the mail.
A local copy of the messages can always be useful.
I can access my email anywhere with web based email programs and I do not have to remember any complicated smtp or pop3 information that changes when I switch ISPs either. Its just always there.
I do not understand how client based email programs are better? Maybe customization in a proprietary ms shop I can see. But Thunderbird is not integrated with MS products like OUtlook is and it will never catch up as MS uses its products to lock out competitors.
http://saveie6.com/
I find gmail search to be the only way I can deal with my 50,000 messages. Thunderbird just hangs and I can't get Google Desktop to play nice with IMAP unless I open each and every message manually first. Yes, I'm an idiot.
But seriously, has anyone been able to manage on the order of 50,000 messages with Thunderbird and do sophisicated searches that actually work?
Seriously, come on. This isn't even a discussion, all email systems should have an available Webmail component as well as a IMAP or POP3 at the least. And if possible an RSS feed.
Google did it right. I love my Gmail but at home I use my Thunderbird through their POP3 server. At work I check their RSS feed through my Google homepage. The only flaw of this system is they don't use IMAP and that's a flaw that I've found I'm going to live with for a while.
Webmail used to suck because you had X storage space. Gmail fixed that, others are reaching that storage capacity too but at the same time desktop mail is bullshit because if you download and delete your mail from the server and lose your hard drive you'll lose years of data in a single moment.
Personally like I said I use both, and I'll continue to use both because it avoids the problem of what to do when your on vacation (VNC used to be a bad option). But when I want the full functionality and "privacy" I'll use Thunderbird and I'll continue to use Thunderbird.
I prefer it. That way I can use a thick client and webmail. It's amazing. Why choose?
EarthLink's Webmail and it limits to only THREE attachments. So in order to attach more than three or a quick way to attach multiple as one shot, I just zip up the images into a single zip file. Since most people can view zip files (XP and Vista have unzip and zip capabilities), this won't be a problem.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The problem with having a traditional email setup is that most ISPs block outgoing SMTP traffic, even if authenticated. This gets old fast when you have to reconfigure your mail client for every network you connect to.
A lot of posters here talk about certain features with a desktop client against a web client not realising that none of this has anything to do with weather the mail is web based or local. The interface can look the same weather on the desktop or a server ( at least in theory) the question is what difference the location of the actual process that handles the input and output makes. There are advantages and disadvantages to both schemes.
Web based:
Can be accessed from any computer that has a browser.
Mail cannot be read while offline
Desktop based:
Requires a configured mail client
All mail can be downloaded at once and read at a latter date when an internet connection is not available
It would appear to me that this means Web based mail would be more attractive to Desktop users who can't easily move their computer arround and who are likely to have a permanent internet connection whereas Laptop and Notebook users would prefer a local client as wireless availability can be limited and it is easier for them to move arround. Of course, you coudl always go with my aproach. I use a web based e-mail but keep a local copy on my desktop. That way I can read my mail from anywhere I want and I also have it available if my connection dies ( which is rather often unfortunately ). Best of both worlds in my opinion.
I use Thunderbird and make SSL/TLS connections for SMTP, POP, and IMAP every day. The very first time it pops up about the certificate being untrusted. I just select the radio button to permanently trust that self-signed certificate. I've never been re-asked ever since...
If I recall, the first option is to trust the cert permanently, the second (and default) is to trust the cert temporarily for the session, the third option is to not trust the cert (and then TB will abort the connection attempt).
Perhaps I am misunderstanding something here?
People assume desktop clients mean POP3, probably because that's all that GMail offers. Well, of course that's what GMail offers - because they don't want you to know about IMAP.
My provider offers webmail AND IMAP support. I can view my mail on my computers using Thunderbird. Or, if I don't have Thunderbird available or configured, I can just log into webmail. All my mail is synchronized between the server and the client. If I delete something in webmail, it's deleted in Thunderbird - and vice versa.
Oh, and I can view my mail on my PDA, too - without using the crappy Google client. And with IDLE support, I get new messages the instant they arrive - on both my PC and my PDA. And I can set up rules on the server to filter mailing lists and other emails into folders.
People think GMail is the end-all of mail because the only other thing they have used is some ISP's crappy POP3 mail.
Thunderbird displays all 6500 messages in my inbox at the same time, on the same screen. Which webmail can do that? Thunderbird downloads mail to my local system, so I can access it offline. Which webmail does that? Thunderbird supports S/MIME encryption and signatures.
Well that's what you get for not using a fliptop phone.
Most pistols have safety mechanisms, especially concealable ones. My Springfield XD has two safeties that must be disengaged (simply by gripping it with your hand) to fire and it takes a pretty bizarre chain of events for that to happen when you're not holding it.
I had the same issues reported (obviously), but the most recent version of thunderbird does allow me to "accept certificate permanently" & I'm no longer bugged everytime I connect to my own server.
No it isn't - GMail lost 40-50 of my e-mails, and said they could basically do nothing about it. So much for storing all data!
Now, all of my GMail accounts get periodically - every 5-15 min. - fetchmailed to my backup server. And I find myself using GMail less and less now since it's easier to just fire up Thunderbird, pull POP off the backup server (my laptop automatically opens an SSH tunnel to my office network) and be able to read/write messages without waiting for a web site to update.
And GMail's POP implementation is horribly broken for use with more than one client. Recent mode is great, but not if you haven't used a given client for > 30 days. Give us a "normal" POP3 option, please, GMail!
-b.
While the security might be a real consideration, the fact of having one email address that I can take pretty much anywhere where the internet is, is a far bigger boon.
It's really my one realiabe access point for the most part.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
What I would really like is a way to use thunderbird and pine concurrently on the same machine (linux). The idea is that when I am physically at the machine I'd use thunderbird (prettier), but when away, I could ssh to the box and use pine instead. All OK, but I still have not figured a way to make pine and thunderbird to share the same "received" "sent" etc mail files so that I could transparently use them on either system. Any help?????
My email server is accessible from anywhere in the world, and I use Gmail to access it. But, why would I trust Google or any third party with my important email alone? It's my stuff, so I'm responsible for it and I'm the only one to blame if something gets ef'd up.
My solution might not fit everybody, but it will work with many users who maintain their own servers or whose employers maintain their own.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
I would love to be able to fully migrate to gmail, but the fact is I travel a lot for business and if it wasn't for the ability to read and respond to emails while disconnected, I would never have time to get to all my messages. As much as I hate Outlook and all the clones and would love to leave them in the dust, there's just no other answer for me right now.
I'd be willing to bet that a fair percentage of Slashdot users are the sort who either need to or don't mind paying for business class Internet access where you can host your own servers. I know I fall into that category. Sure, I still have several GMail accounts, and a .Mac account, but I also have my own domains that run Sendmail, Cyrus IMAP, SquirrelMail, Mailman or Majordomo, and INNd. As soon as it's feasible for me, I'll also be putting up some sort of calendaring and scheduling system. This is probably going to be Apple's Calendar Server, but may end up being Zimbra (as soon as Zimbra Desktop gets up to speed with the other modules).
/27 network, and most of my stuff runs off of old discarded iMacs running Mac OS X and old discarded PCs running OpenBSD or Fedora Core. I've got a nice little firewall in front to keep out the tire kickers, and I can do what ever I want with my boxen, like run RT so my clients can log in and submit trouble tickets to me, or other such useful things.
With my current setup, I have full online and offline access to all my email from any standard client or via a browser. C&S gets a bit more complicated, but given that my primary environment is Mac OS X, as soon as 10.5 is released, I'll be testing the Calendar Server and the new iCal (the current iCal is less than useful, IMO). I'm testing Zimbra right now, and my only real complaint is that it seems to need a whole lot more in the way of hardware resources than my current Sendmail, etc., systems.
I've got a 3Mb DSL service with a
It's not just a vanity exercise for me, since I'm a technology consultant, and it's my job to stay on top of these things. Plus, I've been trying to develop for years now a residential clientele for this sort of stuff, and it's as much a critical business tool for me as it is a proof of concept.
Interestingly enough, had this been a discussion about a car model - a comment about a 2-seat sports car being a competitor to a Corvette say - it would not carry the assumption that the product was available for sale in the US.
All things being equal, your experiences with a US market GM product would be different than your experience with a Japanese market Mazda product. There are many differences - inline-4 vs. v8, left hand drive vs. right, guages in English vs. Japanese - but ultimately they provide the same basic functionality.
Having said that, in this case Thunderbird *does* have the ability to compete with Outlook on the Windows front whereas Outlook does NOT have the ability to compete with Thunderbird on any of the other operating systems. Outlook will not run on openVMS, Solaris, etc.
Yahoo! Mail beta has drag and drop throughout. But no solution for the multiple file attach yet...
Some developers seem to ignore the efficiencies needed for those using the lowest common denominator in terms of bandwidth. There are still many out there on fax/modem connections.
.ani, javascript and phishing problems all disappear when using plain text format. Nothing get run automatically in this mode.
I may be using DSL and yahoomail/gmail/hotmail all seem snappy enough right? Wrong.
Try just logging onto these webmail clients when you're on a 56 Kilobits per second connection. > 30seconds to get the page displayed with a web browser.
Try attaching a photo with a reasonable size say 350KBytes. Ouch...minutes to twiddle thumbs here too.
Sending and receiving html format is not as efficient as sending/receiving text format...Click...wait a few seconds...time for coffee.
Ahhh all sudden I change to Thunderbird and whoa, what a difference. All my emails get downloaded which means it is coffee time when attachments are involved. But once they are downloaded onto the machine, navigating from message to message and displaying them is instantaneous. A webmail client can't boast that on a 56Kbps connection.
As we all know having html format when receiving emails is not the ideal considering all the security hoops we all have to jump through these days. The
Those claiming "Everybody is using Outlook" or "Everybody should be using Sunbird" does not mean rest of us should be doing the same. I prefer Firefox and Thunderbird as separate tools because it follows the Unix motto:"One tool, one job". It keeps things simple.
The most efficient clients seem to be always the oldest ones too? pine, elm, lynx.
They efficiently displayed just text information for those on a 56kbps.
Having said that, we needed a consistent way of accessing similar functionality in the different applications without having to relearn the same stuff from application to application.
That's what X-Window and Win32/Win64 solve and continue to improve on. IBM calls it CUA. Others call it "look and feel". For me Thunderbird feels right because it does one job well. Outlook tries to do too much within one application. If something goes wrong with it, the whole thing crumbles. Does this ring any security bells anyone?
Have a great afternoon.
I've been watching the Mailplane beta with growing interest. What's not to like about Gmail + a simple desktop UI?
Matt Jeppsen
www.freshdv.com
If the situation is dire enough to shoot at all, you shoot to kill.
*sigh* back to work...
There is a group working on an open source clone of Exchange using a reverse engineered version of MAPI. This is still pre-alpha, but it is interesting. The project is called Openchange.
Hmm: could it be offline access to old mail?
Lead developer of desktop MUA thinks that desktop MUAs are better than webmail. News at 11. Yawn.
butter the donkey
Why Desktop Email Still Trumps Webmail
Because webmail interfaces suck ass? Just guessing...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
That's why they make pocket holsters for the things. Sticking a pistol or revolver into your pants pocket without one is dangerous.
A good pocket holster will keep the handgun oriented properly, fit snuggly, but stay in the pocket when you attempt to draw.
I wonder if I can get a leather guy to make me one for my LG chocolate....
Hello;
nobody has replaced Exchange / Outlook simply because the clients suck that have come out to date. Doing calendaring and Email together, in a slick userland experience is somethign nobody seems to be abel to do well. Webmail is not an answer, unless it acts liek a rich client. Has any one looked at the Flash Client that was released by Communigate last week? Pronto is _far_ better than Outlook, not just security, but the features for media.
Jon
Hi;
only if you use Flash or Ajax would I agree, becuase page refreshes and webmail behaiour is not what desktop users will expect. Take a look at Pronto from Communigate, http://www.communigate.com/demoFlash/demo_10.html
Jon
I highly disagree due to the moodiness of desktop email clients. Web mail is always going to work, if it's not working it will be very soon. Desktop email can have hundreds of things go wrong, full pst files corruptions of data. I would have to say that Thunderbird has given me the most headaches of all of them too because of the huge learning curve involved with it's use.
When I finally moved people to it I found that I had to move them back to what they were using before because there was so much of a difference in the user interface. If they would make their software more similar to things people have been using for years they would have much more success. In my opinion Thunderbird should still be in beta testing. This is just my opinion of what I have experienced, I'm sure others use it fine.
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
People in my company pretty much live in Outlook 2007. I have multiple workstations, notebooks and mobile devices synching to the exchange server. Somebody sends out a meeting notice and it needs to be accepted , then it automatically marked in your calender, and they get a list of who is going, the room automatically gets reserved etc, if there is a time conflict the user is notified. Sending an ordinary email would require extra steps, unecessary tracking and time people don't have. It may not sound like a lot of work but if you considered the amount of meetings we have and how often the details change then it becomes a lot of work. I am not a manager, I use it all the time and I'm not really big on calenders. There's other benefits too. If I get a new phone that can mate with an Exchange server, my detailed contacts and notes sych with the phone. I don't have to install plugins or Thunderbird extensions and the experience is pretty consistent across multiple devices. We also use tablet PC a lot as well as a phone that supports ink and I can synch notes that include ink. Also consider that this is the anti-MS capital of the internet so its probably not the best place to ask questions like that without someobody trying to convince you that the general public uses notepad to schedule most of their meetings. There are other options that have some of these capabilities but not all of them. Outlook is the most fearure rich if your ecosystem includes mobile devices or tablet enabled pc's.
Having wasted 2-3 years investigating open source alternatives to Microsoft Exchange I've finally given up.
There is *no* open source exchange alternative that is worth bothering with, certainly none that have the level of finish as Microsoft exchange.
Almost all Open Source exchange alternatives shoot themselves in the foot by either pricing the Outlook connectors above or close to the cost of Exchange or pay the outlook element lip service and not include all features and hope that everyone uses their crummy webmail app. Outlook is an excellent e-mail client, perhaps a bit bloated, but easy enough to use.
Typical problems with open source exchange alternatives are:
1. None or poor support for Nokia Phones / Windows Mobile PDAs.
2. Use the abortion that is IMAP, absolutely slow, buggy and hopeless.
3. Poor implementation of groupware functionality within Outlook.
4. No optimisations for slow links / mobile.
5. No reliable or efficent offline capabilities.
6. Poor choice of backup / archiving add-ons.
7. Poor LDAP / Active Directory support.
8. Crummy management tools.
This is really not worth debating, there can be no open source exchange alternative unless there is a credible Outlook alternative, which for the moment there isn't.
Jason
I use Thunderbird for work and Gmail for my personal mail. Each is ideal for its designated task. If I was forced to use webmail for work and Thunderbird for personal mail, I would go nuts.
So, enough with these "foo is better than bar" declarations. Both exist and are popular because they are the best solution for *some* problem.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Sure, I need to be on the Internet to download new mail, but I already get more email than I can read in a day, and it's usually less critical to have the last five minutes' worth of mail than to be able to read fairly recent mail and look up older email.
It's theoretically possible to emulate that with webmail by saving each new message as a file, stashed in a directory somewhere, or by appending them to a big file in
The advantage of webmail is that if you're in some network environment you don't control, such as at an Internet cafe or behind a customer's firewall or on your work VPN that doesn't let you pass POP/IMAP through to your personal-email mail server, you can access it. That can be useful, and I do use webmail sometimes for that. In theory you can convince some desktop clients to use SSL or SSH tunneling to connect to your POP or IMAP server, though I haven't set up a proxy to do that for Eudora and I'm not sure if Outlook is capable of it if you're using Microsoft's email protocols, but again in theory you can do it.
In practice, I use both for my real email - my personal email goes to an ISP POP/IMAP account that has also a webmail server, so I'll use that to read mail from my work VPN if I need to access it at the same time as accessing work, but I mostly download the mail into Eudora. My work email uses Outlook/Exchange with the mailbox stored on the server, only accessible from inside the VPN, so I use that except for rare occasions when my computer's down or I've forgotten my power cord and am borrowing another machine to read new mail with Outlook Web Access. OWA works fairly well - it's a heavyweight web-based system, wants IE as opposed to older Mozillas, and is somewhat picky about logins, but it lets me access the calendar functions as well as email.
I've also got a couple of free webmail accounts I use for other things - gmail gets some of the high-volume public mailing lists which I don't want to clutter my personal or work email with and don't have privacy concerns about, and fastmail.fm has a nice Unix-flavored webmail system that I use for email from vendors, etc., that needs a bit more permanance than bugmenot or dodgeit.com but also don't mind losing if I haven't checked it in a while.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Even the moset advanced webmail can not provide me with an user interface which is as fast and purpose-oriented as that of pine. Web Applications to me seem as if programmers would have forgotten how to program a user interface. Furthermore i can decide to read e-mail via ssh (if necessary ans ssh java web applet) and then the remote access looks exactly like the local one, and doen not just try to resemble it (and fail poorly in doing so!). In combination with a "screen session" this thing can follow you around the world exactly in the state in which you left it (I had a opened pine-session in a screen, which followed me for three weeks and 20000km). Can anybody tell me an webmail which has the same cool "remote config" feature as pine? Doe any webmail have an editor as advanced as emacs or as useful as vi, or do i really only get a stupid Test edit field in an input form where some incapable programmer decide to bind som mouse button event to something unresonable? Can I decide when to update or will my stupid provider force "new features" and "new website designs" onto me when i just got to 40% pine productivity?
No, my opinion is: Web application are good for simple things, which you do sometimes. Something like e-mail which i am doing nearly each day several times is easier to handle with a stable, locally install application completely under my control, which one should not change more often than every five years.
Hey Gmail, release a desktop client for Gmail and I will dump my hotmail account forever....
I'm making the switch to a desktop client, because gmail is broken in Opera. I'm sick of fairly random line changes, and not being able to paste text with a middle click. It's even more disabled in Konqueror, and I refuse to use firefox for my own reasons.
It's also slow, disconnects occasionally, and inaccessible when I'm not online.
You don't have to choose between POP3 and a proprietary web interface for personal email, and you don't have to settle for ambiguous or outright shady privacy policies.
It will cost you less than $50/year you can choose between a number of reliable, reputable, pay email providers. They offer IMAP, POP3 if you want, and a web interface for when you don't have access to a thick client. Most also provide file storage space.
My OS X Mail app and my provider's web interface integrate seamlessly due to the "magic" of IMAP (it apparently is magic to most email users, considering what they put up with).
I use Mail at home. And at work if I want to fire off or read a few personal emails over lunch I bring up the web interface.
I read the introductory paragraphs of this interview and all I could think is: "Why on earth should we care?"
Welcome to 1996.
I like desktop-clients because of the GPG-signing/encryption support... Just like that
ghostbar page.
that day will be when they wake up and make 'Sent' and 'Received' Dates rather than just Sent. No one uses Sent except for the Sent folder ya bunch of hacks.
They're supposedly going to have support for offline applications, e.g. GMail. Should be very interesting.
I don't want to read
There is an ever increasing business migration towards exchange + outlook. It's practically a standard in most large enterprise organisations.
There is no way on this planet that any of the last few fortune 50 places I've worked at would even consider using anything other than exchange + outlook. The rest of your suggestions are living in a fantasy land of "the geeks shall inherit the earth" (i.e. ignorance of the posters point) and have little to no relevancy when regard to business usage standards.
I disagree.
Sure, alot of people I email use gmail. But they don't receive my bank statements, invoices, newsgroup replies and political newletters.
So google gets to mine my bloviating about stories from "back in the day", comments about bands, and ideas for the next road trip. Nothing I'm worried about really.
Plus, if I went to webmail, I wouldn't be able to email customers to discuss private issues using public-key encryption. Would you give a webserver access to your private key just to read a message? I wouldn't.
Cheers
.
Someone else said it perfectly in this thread...
I've been very patient searching for a solution, there is *no* release quality open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange.
One thing I've learnt is that those who most require calendar sharing / true groupware features are those that have the least patience for quirks.
And there lies the entire issue. The people who need exchange with all of its integration options are the people that deal in terms of money normally. These are the kind of people who ask questions like 'how many hours of my life will it take to make that solution work for me vs getting exchange out of the box'. They are more than happy to spend the money on Exchange because for the most part, it just works. The time they could spend fiddling with their phone / blackberry/ whatever is time that could be better spent earning revenue and that's what their job is.
For most people, Outlook / Exchange is Good Enough(tm), and you have to find something MUCH better to convince them to switch. You have to show benefits to their day-to-day life that are immediately visible. Open standards don't mean anything to these people and you can't sit in a corner yelling and hope that they change their mind.
Show me a single out of the box Linux solution that provides the following and I'll start selling it tomorrow!
1. Decent off-line e-mail access
2. Scheduling multiple people in multiple locations (timezones) at the same time as a resource (conference bridge / meeting room / combo of these) is available
3. Webmail
4. No need for managing users and passwords just for this solution (e.g. LDAP / AD integration)
5. Shared calendars
6. Multiple domains with the same user name (e.g. user@domain.com or \\domain\user for auth)
Sure, I can start with OpenLDAP (despite all the problems it has). Then I can bolt on an SMTP server that can authenticate against something else (e.g. Exim / Courier). Then I have to configure the SMTP server to do lookups against the LDAP server to validate incoming mail. That's going to add load, so I better chuck another LDAP server in here, and just this config with Exim / Courier is non-trivial.
Then I need a webmail solution. I can go for Squirrelmail and hope that my users never accidentally contact the Squirrelmail team for help and get abused, or I can go for IMP, which is just complex. Once I've picked one, it's time to integrate it with the LDAP / AD solution again so that we can do authentication this time.
So... what do we still have left? Calendaring and clients... Can anyone name a decent calendaring solution where I can do everything that the Outlook / Exchange combo lets me do? Can I easily see someone else's calendar? Can I choose to share my calendar with just a specific group of people? Can I Just publish my busy / free time?
The other option is to look at the so called exchange competitors out there, but they all have similar issues. None of them today offers a complete drop-in solution for Exchange, and until they do, they are just vapourware as far as their target market is concerned.
I (have to) use Lotus Notes, webmail has been streets ahead of that for decades!!!
The article is nothing but a plug for Thunderbird. Which still doesn't work with Exchange. Yes, fuck off - it DOESN'T. Don't even think about telling me to use IMAP because that's a band-aid that simply doesn't work for everyone. Thunderbird needs real and real simple Exchange support or it will not succeed in offices. That is all.
Life needs more saving throws.
Am I missing something here, or is everybody making a choice? I have *both* webmail and thunderbird looking into the same IMAP folders. Is that black magic to all of you (I seriously doubt that). When on the road, I use the web client, when in the office, I use thunderbird.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
Often times I find myself without an Internet connection or without a fast and reliable one. I don't want to get caught having to find an Internet connection just to bring up gmail to find the email that tells me what time my meeting is. I should be able to just fire up pine and find the email locally. That said, I have found that I prefer gmail's spam filtering and archiving features to be very useful. So useful in fact that I retired pine last year and haven't looked back.
You don't necessarily choose the 10 mm if you're tech savvy, especially if you're choosing a gun for CCW. While I do enjoy shooting my Glock 20, I don't think I could handle the recoil of the round if I were using a smaller pistol, which I want for CCW. I suppose I could use 10 mm light, but what's the point, then? I might as well go with .45 ACP, which is generally cheaper and about as powerful as the 10 mm light. For me, the Glock 36 is perfect. It's smallish and it's chambered in .45 ACP, which is more than enough to end any confrontation I might find myself in. 10 mm would be overkill.