Thunderbird vs. Gmail

January 12, 2006 11:15 PM

Thunderbird vs. Gmail: What are the pros and cons of using one over another, and how can they be used together effectively? What have you found useful that the other one did not have?
posted by Knigel to Computers & Internet (17 answers total)

For a long time I usd gmail and thunderbird together. I was travelling and I used gmail as a good, always available stmp outgoing server, as the one I used to use couldn't be accessed away from home.
posted by travosaurus at 11:20 PM on January 12, 2006

I also use Thunderbird and Gmail together. But I find that if I check my Gmail with Thunderbird at work, when I get home and do the same, I don't get all the messages. Just the new ones. This is despite the fact that I have both Thunderbird clients set up to "leave messages on server for 7 days."

So that would be my complaint. Otherwise it's all good. Sometimes I go straight to the web to use Gmail and I'm always surprised how much I like it. But I use Tbird for checking a few POP boxes too so it's my workhorse.

The address-book feature in Gmail is better by far. Tbird doesn't "remember" contacts you reply to, or something to that effect. I'm always having to type out full email addresses. Gmail has a slick suggest-as-you-type feature that remembers pretty much anyone you've interacted with. And Gmail's search is better. And the threading is actually okay. I don't always use it. But sometimes I do.

Tbird has some simple advantages, like dragging and dropping attachments and messages between mailboxes, and stuff. And more security options, if you're into that. And extensions.
posted by scarabic at 11:37 PM on January 12, 2006

I use gmail by itself and it does everything I need and more. I don't know of any features that thunderbird provides that gmail doesnt except imap.
posted by meta87 at 12:40 AM on January 13, 2006

Oh and something I forgot to mention. I love gmail's spam blocker, I've been using it over a year and haven't gotten more then 10 spam emails in my inbox. (And I get a lot of emails.)
posted by meta87 at 12:42 AM on January 13, 2006

Use Tbird and then your mail is yours. You can archive it and you have it forever. Your attachments are yours.

I hope that some of my other email accounts delete my emails too. If I ever get sued there is good possibility that I can just destroy my own emails. This is somewhat paranoid, but who knows what the future will bring?

Who knows where, what or who will own Google in 10 years. They might be nice now, but who knows in the future. Google can have the best code of conduct in the world, but then MS or whoever invents some feature that buries them for search, and thus advertising. Google drops dramatically and the SCO buys them.

Tbird also means that you can compose emails when your net connection is fried. Gmail introduces another point of failure into the system. So if you're in South Nowheresville with just your laptop and their net connection fails you can still find the address and phone number of your friend's sister's Aunt Whatsername.
posted by sien at 1:04 AM on January 13, 2006

Meta87: I wasn't so successful with GMail's spam catching.

Having said that, I still use Gmail for all my email now. SO much nicer to be able to check all my email wherever I am, rather than being stuck with my home PC. I was planning on uploading all of my archived email to gmail as a backup, and then my HD crashed... d'oh! So now I'm sticking strictly to Gmail. I assume google isn't going anywhere.
posted by antifuse at 1:59 AM on January 13, 2006

Tbird doesn't "remember" contacts you reply to, or something to that effect

Thunderbird 1.5 is out today and this is one of their touted new features:

276632: make autocomplete be more like google suggest (make it most popular results come first)

They've also added built-in support for deleting attachments from messages which I've tried out and it works well..enabling me to get rid of the extension that did that which was just a tad clumsy.

I've tried out GMail but haven't really gotten into it. The main reason I stick with Thunderbird is that I like to have access to everything offline. I'm a filer, but TB does have Labels and Saved-Search Folders so you may be able to approximate the GMail 'Save all your email in one big folder and just add keywords' thing. I haven't really done that too much.

The critical extension for me with my extensive mail-folder hierarchy is Quick-File which allows you to archive messages to and (with the soon to be released version 0.16) navigate into any of your mail folders using only a few keystrokes. Wow I can't wait for that one...

As far as portability of my email, I daily shuttle my entire TB (and Firefox) profiles back and forth from home to work, keeping them updated on my USB drive, so all my latest email is always handy. Also creates at least one automatic backup since I'm now responsible for not losing all that stuff.
(Here's my plug for SyncBackSE)
posted by jacobsee at 2:09 AM on January 13, 2006

I access my Gmail over POP, using Thunderbird. The main problem I've found is Thunderbird's useless search engine. It's incredibly slow (presumably it doesn't index mail), and has all sorts of annoying little quirks. For example, an "entire message" search returns hits from the raw code of attachments (a JPEG's raw code looks something like this "7g46JnsfpTdvqOO5H19an5it3") which is entirely useless, and greatly increases search time.

The best solution to this is to use Thunderbird for browsing/reading mail, and Google Desktop Search for searching mail.
posted by matthewr at 2:15 AM on January 13, 2006

And as much as I like open source, Outlook 2003's user interface is light years ahead of Thunderbird's.

The Thunderbird UI is IRRITATING. If you are not bothered by MS products, Outlook 2003 is the best mail client money can buy.

For POP email at least - it can also be a bitch when connecting to IMAP or MAPI servers on slow connections - Thunderbird's connectivity is more stable.

For my personal e-mail I use Gmail it's hassle-free and really fast. Though I would like to have access to my e-mails when I am offline for example, but I guess I can live without it until ubiquous wireless broadband arrives.
posted by falameufilho at 4:16 AM on January 13, 2006

falameufilho: I would really like one solid example that explains to my why you think Outlook is so far ahead of TBird in UI design. The Thunderbird UI was built based on Mozilla, which was made to look like the old Netscape mail, which was the first mail interface I used other than telnet. So it isn't at all irritating to me. I find the Outlook interface to be annoying. I imagine that the interface issues are more personal than universal: if everyone hated it as much as you do, nobody would use it. (On the other hand, Eudora has the worst user interface ever designed, and a lot of people use it. Go figure.)

I use TBird for my IMAP mail. The speed issues don't seem to depend at all upon the program, it's the server. TBird with the "push" option is snappy as hell with a decent IMAP server, but can get bogged down when the mailbox is extremely large or the server is suffering from speed issues.

If Gmail ever gets IMAP working I'd love to archive my old messages there. As it is, my IMAP account only has about 128 megs of space, so I archive older things at home (personal) or on my laptop (work-related). Most of the time this is great, but if I leave my laptop in my office, I can't get that message with the attached file that was sent to me three years ago when I need it.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:31 AM on January 13, 2006

I use thunderbird with gmail, but only because I have several accounts to monitor, and can't keep the web interface for all of them open at the same time. I agree with the criticisms of thunderbirds ui, and find it generally annoying. (Now that I think about it, I could just autoforward mail from each of my gmail accounts to one meta-account, which I could keep open in my browser. Hmmm.)
posted by monju_bosatsu at 8:35 AM on January 13, 2006

I have Thunderbird set up to access Gmail via POP, but rarely use it--I'm tied to the Gmail web interface because of the Gmail notifications in Firefox, which I find insanely convenient. The GmailDelete and WebMailCompose extensions fill out the functionality of the web interface even more.

Occasionally I open Thunderbird to download and archive (on my own hard drive) my mail, or to compose mail when the 'net's down, or do something fancy in an email.
posted by needs more cowbell at 9:02 AM on January 13, 2006

Why can't I copy something and then PASTE it in GMAIL?

Am I stoopid?
posted by SwingingJohnson1968 at 10:23 AM on January 13, 2006

I just switched from TBird to Gmail for all my work e-mail this past week. Holy cow, do I love it. The immediate reason for the switch was that TBird had started randomly dropping people from my groups, which was unacceptable, but I also found some big Gmail advantages:
--improved searchability (TBird's search does indeed suck);
--the threaded style of displaying back-and-forth e-mail exchanges;
--tagging, which I find works better than folders for organizing messages;
--and perhaps most of all, my ability to access it anywhere, which means that apart from the obvious advantages, I've also started using it as an organizing/note-taking tool. When I'm in a meeting, I open a new e-mail to myself, type in notes, and send it to myself; when I get back to the office, I just add appropriate tags (including "to-do" if there's follow-up stuff from the meeting). Any document/spreadsheet I need to have instantly available no matter what computer I'm at, I just e-mail to myself and it's always readily available.
posted by Kat Allison at 10:32 AM on January 13, 2006

Why can't I copy something and then PASTE it in GMAIL?

Am I stoopid?

on windows, firefox:
ctrl-v to paste works.
alternately, switch to plain text mode and right-click->paste will work as well. no idea why right-click->paste isn't available in rich text mode.
posted by juv3nal at 11:41 AM on January 13, 2006

Why is the question x vs. y? You can use both. I exclusively use Gmail now, but I use Outlook 2003 with Gmail's POP access at home, and I use the web interface everywhere else. With a few rules in Outlook, even mail I send through the web interface is archived in my Outlook Sent Items folder.
posted by AstroGuy at 12:44 PM on January 13, 2006

caution live frogs: Outlook's interface is more well finished. See for example, how they implemented the 3 reading panes (folders - message list - message) in tree vertical stripes. See how each item in the message list in OUtlook breaks in two lines? Beautiful. Thousands of other little examples like that.

Thunderbird's UI is the same from Netscape mail, regurgitated. Nothing new. The UI, by the way, is were most of the problems with open source software reside.
posted by falameufilho at 8:52 PM on January 13, 2006