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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).'"
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.
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
"It doesn't make sense to have thick clients anymore, when the web apps can do everything that the desktop apps can..."
Until you don't have an Internet connection. I can type up 30 emails and queue them in the outbox until I do get connected if it is local.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
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.
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
"Funny"? How about insightful!? Lol.
I run several independent qmail/vpopmail mail clusters, with a couple of different webmail packages, IMAP access from anywhere, and Eudora, Thunderbird, and MSOE at various times, and user IMAP from another Exchange server for our corporate parent.
And I *still* prefer to shell in and use pine for my "personal" account on campus rather than the other solutions they provide. It's convenient, easy, has never lost me an email, works under low bandwidth conditions, and after 10 years is just as fast as any of the other clients for me. On the off-chance I actually do need to view something with images in it, I simply (B)ounce it to my work account.
Can't beat simplicity.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
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.
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
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.
You don't need to sort by date, because you can search by date. Search for :after:2006/3/1 before:2006/4/1 to find emails from last March, for example.
If only we could convince someone to write the Exchange competitor on an open database...
What, like this?
Why do people use Outlook and Exchange? Because Outlook is more full-featured than any other email client out there (I admit, this isn't always a good thing, but just try getting someone who *wants* those features to use a generic IMAP application. And Outlook will *never* do IMAP right, because that eliminates most of the reason to buy Exchange), and because Exchange gives you the calendaring and scheduling side of things in a way that is far superior to any other application out there except for the old CS&T/Netscape/Steltor/Oracle Calendar Server.
How is it that the entire software industry has sat back and allowed Microsoft to completely dominate with Exchange and Outlook for the last ten fscking years? What the F are people thinking? Of course, once again, it's Apple that has to pull everybody's collective asses out of the fire, and no one will end up appreciating it.
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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.
Just my $0.02, it seems to me that although Thunderbird does run on various non-Windows OS's, this isn't entirely relevant because most PC's don't run on non-Windows OS's, at least not at this time. If you're attempting to debate whether Thunderbird is a competitor, it only seems proper to consider only, or at least give the most weight to, how each performs under Windows, as that's how most people will use the two products. Looking at how they do under Windows, perhaps Thunderbird is more of a competitor now than it was, but I wouldn't consider it a serious competitor quite yet, if only because Outlook/Windows in general are so well-established. And for that reason, people will be comparing Thunderbird's feature set to Outlook's and wondering why they should switch if they don't see all of the same features they currently have. I guess I tend to agree with Anonymous in the end, although I am always glad to see these projects improving.