Desktop Mail Clients

With the advancements in webmail, I’ve never seen the need for desktop mail clients. I mean, I understand the need for Outlook, or a similar mail client, for work email where you’re constantly sending and receiving email and integrating it with calendars and tasks, but for personal email for accounts at Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail, I never quite understood it. The interfaces of those clients are great and I don’t know why someone would choose a mail client instead of the webmail interface. With the ability to add extensions to Firefox to notify you of new mail, you don’t even have to login to check to see if you have new mail. The major webmail services tend to offer all the features you want from a mail client built in to the web interface. That being said, I’ve decided to give the desktop client another go.

For one of my websites I’ve decided to use my host’s email. Instead of constantly logging in to my host’s webmail system, I decided to set up the account in Thunderbird. I’ve never had anything against Thunderbird, and I think it’s a great app, but like I said, if you’re using something like Gmail, I never saw the point. Well, I’ve been using it for a couple weeks and it’s fine. I don’t get much mail on that account so my opinion is mostly neutral. I have decided to add my Gmail account to Thunderbird to give it a go. One reason for this was because Gmail has been throwing me a lot of errors lately when I try to do something and I wind up having to close the window or tab and open Gmail back up. I won’t need to do that with Thunderbird. The setup is easy and Google provides perfect instructions for optimal integration with Thunderbird. I’m still not sure I see the point. Gmail is just as easy to access via my Gmail notifier or Google Talk, so I don’t save any time. I do kind of miss the threaded view of Gmail, but that’s not a deal breaker for me. Will I stick with it? I’m not sure. I’ll try it for a couple weeks but I have a feeling I’ll be going back to regular Gmail.