The blog has got a little side-tracked over the past couple of days after I visited a new local bookstore and walked away with 40 Euros worth of books! But while I'm reading Ken Follett's new 1,100 page masterpiece, I finally decided to stop procrastinating over something that I have been considering for months. I finally installed Mozilla Thunderbird.

I have always never been able to decide about whether my email should be online or offline. For years I used Microsoft Outlook until I realised I liked email to be online and portable. But then Gmail went through its beta "oops, your email isn't available right now, try again later!" phase so I thought it would be best to download email to the desktop so I'd have access to it at all times. Plus everyone I bump into seems to love Thunderbird. So last night, I thought "screw it, just do it" and I downloaded the email client to see what it is like.

But I gave myself a rescue hatch. I told Gmail to keep a copy of everything in its archive. So if I decide that Thunderbird is not for me, I can switch back to web-based mail in an instant.

On first impressions, Thunderbird IS impressive. It is easily customisable and setting up your email accounts is a snap. Everything seems to work as advertised. Writing and sending emails is pleasant and I can attach different signatures for different email accounts (a feature I wish the web-based Gmail would have). The add-ons for Thunderbird are numerous and interesting and you can customise the noise a "new mail" notification makes (although I disabled this). You can also make filters to send email to different folders and you can even set up a "conversation view" of emails, just like Gmail.

However, I do have 2 negative comments :

1. Thunderbird couldn't import my Gmail address book. It all came through garbled. The thought of having to manually type hundreds of contacts into my Thunderbird address book is depressing.

2. The RSS feeds ability is not easy to handle. I tried to unsubscribe from a feed for example and nothing happened. I tried to manually delete RSS folders and nothing happened. Plus instead of showing you the text in a new feed, it loads the source webpage which really slows things down. Another problem was that instead of downloading all RSS feeds, it downloaded everything from my Google Reader archive - thousands of old posts which I had to manually delete from Thunderbird. Tedious and time consuming.


I'll keep experimenting with Thunderbird and see if it grows on me. I normally give new apps a minimum of a week to prove themselves. However, since I check my email from various computers, I may end up deciding to continue using the portability and convenience of web-based email. But we'll see. Thunderbird has many good things going for it that I am starting to get attached to it.

How about you? When it comes to email, online or offline? Do you use Thunderbird?