I was a lover of Outlook for a very long time. But creating the email rules and folders to sort just got old after a while. Also, it seemed to slow down after I installed a spam blocker. Then someone introduced me to Opera.
Opera was and is great as a mail client. The sorting by contacts is terrific! That is primarily what I want to sort by when I am not sorting by date. And the fact that all of the sorting is "virtual" and the message isn't being copied all over the place is just great. Adding new contacts is very easy in Opera as well. It was also easy to have multiple email identities and easily change which one was currently sending email. On the browser front, I have stopped using Opera as a browser and gone back to Mozilla (I don't know why, I just like Mozilla better) but I was still using Opera for email.
But my company is now starting to encrypt most of its email and this is a feature that Opera does not yet support. I was afraid that I would have to go back to Outlook.
Then, I opened Mozilla's mail. ICK! But... it does support encryption. On a whim I downloaded Thunderbird in hopes of 1) a better mail client than Mozilla's mail 2) encryption. SUCCESS! Not only does it support the two above, it may just beat out Opera's capabilities as well. I can type in the name of the person that I want to sort by in the "Subject or Sender contains:" search box above the listing of emails, and Thunderbird then displays only those emails. I don't mind a little typing, that gives you some flexibility. It is still virtual-ish.
So far, GMail has to be my favorite client. It doesn't have support for encryption and can't handle sending as multiple email identities, but the sorting and keyboard shortcuts are terrific.
I am going to give Thunderbird a try for now and see how it goes. I don't think I am going to need multiple identities since they are now split. All personal email goes to GMail and all business email will be in Thunderbird.
Posted by carl at May 6, 2004 09:10 AM
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