GMail vs. Thunderbird: GMail wins!

I switched over to GMail a couple months ago and am very pleased. My specific reason for switching was because I wanted to use GMail as my spam filter. It works wonders and I get almost no spam these days. In addition since I've gotten used to labels instead of folders I can't really imagine going back.

I have recently found some minor drawbacks, the biggest being a lack of lists for contacts. In general though I think GMail has really helped reign in the mess of emails I receive on a daily basis.

normally new accounts or less-public account rarely gets spammer's attention. The more you use it, the more likely you will get spams, even with gmail.

normally new accounts or less-public accounts rarely get spammer's attention. The more you use it, the more likely you will get spams, even with gmail.

I agree that gmail is interesting, for some people it might work better then a desktop client but for us, who live inside email (me) is absolutely nonsense.

Speed for me isn't a big issue since I spend 90% of my time reading and I actualy don't need speed for this.

I use Gnus (http://www.gnus.org), it's for Emacs. It's not fast, Emacs isn't multi-threaded but I am inside my text editor so I am very confortable with it. I have bbdb to store my contacts, I have spam blocking with bogofilter, I can index everything so finding an old message is easy, I have emacs lisp, I have all functions and key bindings to browse messages, threads, etc. I doubt it there is a similar mail client, imagine a webmail...

I took the same path: forwarding my company email to Gmail to play around and as an offsite backup mechanism. Three months later and I practically live in Gmail. As I mentioned in a short response on mambofrog, it is no longer hard to envision online editors that work better than MS Word, accounting tools that are better than Quicken, and so on. Exciting times...

Tim Broeker

So did you emulate the "14+ days" filter (and other date based filters) in GMail? If so, how did you do it?

Gmail will never become my primary email account until it allows me programmability and integration with shell scripts running on my unix box.

I need to be able to run both incoming and outgoing mail through my own filters. In the case of outgoing, this would be before and after mail composition.

Philip:

My mail is forwarded to GMail *after* such processing.

I've tried to like gmail on several occasions. In fact I do like it, but not enough to make it my primary app. The idea of search instead of filing is a great one, but with desktop search I can get that on my desktop. I do a lot of travelling, which means I'm on a slow connection frequently, which means any web based email is painful. Sticking with desktop for now; maybe it takes the few weeks of forcing myself to make me a believer.

Justin, check out this greasemonkey script: http://persistent.info/archives/2005/03/01/gmail-searches

So what happen to Yahoo's Oddpost? I remember I heared that Oddpost was quite a nice webapp. But I don't see any Ajax in Yahoo! Mail yet.

Let's put it this way: GMail _can_ be faster, but it isn't necessarily. DUring the last few weeks it has been pretty slow for me, takingabout 4-5 seconds to load the index page, and another ~2 sec. to open a message. Plus it puts my CPU usage (with Firefox on WinXP) at 100% regularly which makes my fan go on and sometimes totally kills Firefox. So I have ambivalent feelings towards GMail. But I agree - and some people pointed it out - that GMail is really all about the usability, not the space, rather the space being a vehicle to really let the search feature shine (and just because they can ;)).

Greetings,
GMail is my primary email now also, mainly because I use about a half dozen different computers over the course of the day, and I want my email available at all of them.

That said, any webmail service would do, but GMail makes it seamless, acts identically on all of the machines I use, and is fast and easy. I've made a few feature suggestions (stored searches being my #1 request, and being able to respond as the user the email was sent to being #2), but for my needs it's better than anything else out there.

I disagree with the poster who commented on envisioning 'editors better than Word', etc., however. There are substantial advantages to being a local application. However, some of those advantages are outweighed by the power of centralized servers for specific applications. Email happens to be a perfect centralizable (web-style) application, since by its nature we're usually talking to a remote server to deal with it.

Anyhow, my .02, inflation adjusted...

-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Personally I haven't seen anything faster than Mail.app on Tiger. When you can incrementally search 10k messages in your inbox while you type in GMail you should post about it again :)

So...we should use Gmail instead of Yahoo Mail?

I've been doing the same thing, but I still spend more time in Thunderbird. Of course, that also means much of my ordering is in there. I finally figured out how I could get the GMail spamfilter working better for me, too: leave the spam in there! I used to clean it out regularly, but apparently then the mail won't count anymore. So it's working pretty good now.

One thing which I consider a pity is that there is no easy way to propagate filtering rules from GMail to Thunderbird. I have a few rules, and it would be nice if I could set them up in GMail and have Thunderbird just use some header to put the mail in a box.

I can't work out how to send an email from with gmail that uses my personal domain name rather than xxx@gmail.com as the From address.

Without that ability, it's useless for sending emails from my point of view.

Sam:

I tried using Mail.app back in the 10.2 and 10.3 days. But it's IMAP support was crap. Apple lost me on that.

Mike:

You should use whatever works for me. I think I've made it abundantly clear that GMail works for me.

Rob:

You can't. However, you can ask it to set the Reply-To: header to your real address. For most usage, that seems to be all that's necessary. The majority of folks don't even see my email address these days--so many clients hide them and show only my "friendly" name.

Thanks Jeremy. Your post was a catalyst to my now importing my mails (archived from a very long time) into gmail.

I used the script from here: http://www.marklyon.org/gmail/old/default.htm to import and it is wonderful.

I now have a platform independent search tool for my mails.

I still haven't found a compelling reason to switch to Gmail (from Yahoo). I just checked it out again and I couldn't find a way to upload email from other pop3 accounts.

>> Gmail will never become my primary email account until it allows me programmability and integration with shell scripts running on my unix box.

Are there ANY email hosts that DO offer this??

Database-powered mailers can give the best of both worlds: large mail storage with versatible categorization/search/retrieval capabilities, but owned and run by yourself and accessible with a local app. Check out Manitou-Mail
for example (and, huh, I'm biased as the developer of this one).

The href didn't make it in the previous post so here it is in plaintext: http://www.manitou-mail.org

Re: Where will you store your data?

For at least those people living in the United States, where your data is stored is a big deal. If it is stored within your home, it has better protection of the Fourth Amendment. Data stored with a third party (even your own server stored outside your home) has significantly different protections.

Totally. I just installed DBMail and it's pretty cool.

What does your company say about putting work related emails on external servers? Are you not worried that a curious googler will read a few of your emails?

Runner:

You talking to Tim?

Jeremy

I have tried and tried Mark Lyon's gmail import tool with no success. It seems Thunderbird puts emails in separate mbox files, depending on the folder they're in, which makes it very difficult for me, since I have about a hundred folders for organizing my email (which is part of the reason I'm interested in importing it into gmail and giving it a try).

If I can get all my existing email into gmail, then I may be tempted to try it out exclusively for awhile. My job situation is changing soon, and I won't be working from home anymore. That means I have to find a good way to keep track of my email from multiple accounts regardless of where I am (a good online calendar/todo app would be nice in this situation, too).

jxhndxen, it's Yahoo you need not Gmail :)

So yeh like a many people I'm still waiting to see how Oddpost is gonna be implemented in Yahoo!. I think I heard some features like the automatic To-line drop down menu related to the Address Book was one of them... Was that all ?

As for Gmail...unless they present a REAL PIM with a real Address Book a calendar and a Notepad and a file storage I'm not so much interested.

Finally, you're seeing the light ;-)

I hope the Mail/PIM team is reading this.

I agree that the Gmail email model is great and I've been trying to replicate it using IMAP and IMAP keywords (labels). The reasons I don't simply switch to Gmail are:

1] Ads
2] Tracking of my activities and interests by Google (which they *are* doing because that's how they know what context-sensitive ads to serve)
3] Can't use my own domain in the From: header
4] Can't import and export messages using a standard protocol or API
5] Can't use different clients to access my messages

I agree with the preceding post...the biggest deal-stopper for me despite the daily lure of Gmail is that I can't use my own domain in the from: header...

it's one of the key reasons I use Yahoo! mail as my key secondary web mail service...they allow you to use your own domain name as well as your yahoo address. It's a KEY FEATURE.

all the other issues, like
-ads,
-google tracking my activities
-no fourth amendment protection
-not being able to use other email clients to -access email, etc.
I can probably live with.

Alright as for tracking the user's activities maybe you guys wanna read this thread:

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=322370

Hey Jeremy-

Does Yahoo have any plans to support IMAP with Yahoo Mail?

If we did, I couldn't tell you.

Yet.

Are you also forwarding your company email?

Does Yahoo trust Google?

Want to know what Yahoo is up to? Just read Zawodny's email...

aren't you glad that google does no evil. i'm sure that all that confidential yahoo corporate mail going through their servers is totally secure.

what I think the only downside to gmail UI is that I can't access it without a internet link.
with thunderbird, I can still get to those important emails which store my e-ticket details or reseveration numbers when the wireless link is dead and I'm standing infront of the reseveration counter (having lost the printed version) like I had to last week.

I had to look at my (Yahoo!) calendar to make sure this wasn't an April Fool's joke. Why use Gmail when you should be 'eating-your-own-dogfood' with Yahoo! Mail? If you don't like it or you feel it's not as versatile, why not let your coderz know? Maybe I'm not understanding your role there...

Cheers, Jake

Jake:

I spit that dog food out long ago. And I'm pretty sure the folks who work on Y! Mail know how their product compares to GMail, what types of users prefer each service, and so on. It's their job to know that kind of stuff.

That said, I was really hoping that we'd see some visible evidence of the OddPost acquisition quite some time ago. If I find a Y! Mail hacker with a blog, I'll be sure to point it out.

Fair enough - thanks for the quick response! I think you mention a good point when you mention users and their preferences for different services. One reason I prefer Y! Mail is their AddressGuard function - I must have over 100 disposable email addresses that I can send/receive and/or delete at will. If you hear more about the OddPost integration, please let us know!

Jake

Since some people are using this post to list why they aren't using GMail I'll follow along...

I need/want the ability to change the colors of the various labels I create. It might not sound like a big deal to some, but the way I process/ "weed out" email the color coding is a necessary evil. I have the ability in Yahoo Mail and until I have it in GMail I'm staying with Yahoo.

One last thing. I'm out on desktop based email apps. I hate having to manage where I pulled an email down, and IMAP isn't an option.

Erik

jeremy: it is not until now i read tims post, so I guess the question goes for both of you. You said all your mail, so I assumed, perhaps falsely, that you also forwarded your work mail.

Runner:

Technically, mail sent to me at work is not "mine" -- it belongs to The Company.

Jeremy,

I've been thinking the same thing recently (Gmail faster vs. Tbird) and was about to post about it when I happened to look at your blog yesterday. You took the words right out of my mouth! :)

http://jameselee.myblogsite.com/blog/_archives/2005/5/25/883495.html

I've only briefly scanned the comments, but I'm impressed that you are objective in your evaluation of technologies despite where you happen to work. I've seen too many cases lately where I work in which the services provided by the organization are promoted regardless of whether they're actually the best solution to the problem.

Re: Jake's point about Address Guard - Plus addressing, which Gmail supports (and sadly, Y! Mail doesn't seem to) can approximate the functionality of disposable email addresses.

I'm glad to have found some people who think about all this stuff as much as (or more than!) I do!

RESIST GMAIL!

http://www.google-watch.org/gmail.html

You're right of course.

But there IS a point to the big size GMail offers as well.

Say in 5 years you're in a city on the other side of the country, or the world for that matter. Will you at that time have with you ALL your mail of the last 5 years in Thunderbird?

Nope. But with Gmail, you do. You can find messages in seconds that you are writing today.

Cheers,
Chanchao

Hi,

I guess that the points mentioned by all of you ir true and Gmail does seem to be faster than most of the email providers. But on a different note, I stil doubt the security of Gmail. I was exploring the loopholes in Gmails some days back and while doing some RnD, I could actually open my Gmail account without any password just by faking my session ID.
So It will take some more time for Gmail to get stabilized.

Umesh
umesh_joshi@spanners4us.com

Just be sure not to choose the "Remember me on this computer." option in the login page. To get into the login page again and unclick on the checkbox, just log out from GMail and you get there.

you do know that thunderbird has a search function right

And it sucks. The mail is searched on demand with no pre-indexing.

Man, this blog post is dated - first comment is on on May 21, 2005 08:23 PM.

Anyway,

I loved Gmail since day one, and it immediately became my primary email. True, not all love it, and Yahoo may have its lovers, but Gmail is tuned well to play my tune that I can't stand any other email client now.

Surprzied to hear some objections, allow me to suggest some solutions:

3] Can't use my own domain in the From: header
Yes you can. Add another account in SETTINGS:
Mail Settings > General > Accounts
Send mail as: > Add another email address

Now you can send as MyName@MyDomain.org
1] Ads
Firefox, Greasmonkey Script:
Hide Gmail Ads
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/1057

2] Tracking of my activities and interests by Google (which they *are* doing because that's how they know what context-sensitive ads to serve)
I don't think there is any email service that doesn't filter/scan your email, why bash Gmail?

4] Can't import and export messages using a standard protocol or API
POP3 is fairly standard. There are also many practical tools to do it - some posters mentioned them.

5] Can't use different clients to access my messages
What exactly do you mean? You can use any pop3 client with Gmail.

"Say in 5 years you're in a city on the other side of the country, or the world for that matter. Will you at that time have with you ALL your mail of the last 5 years in Thunderbird?" RESPONSE: Yes, if you use Thunderbird portable on your portable USB flash drive http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/email/portable_thunderbird

I have my last three years of e-mail on a 1 GB USB flash drive; the portable Thunderbird and data take up less than an 1/8 of my storage on the flash drive.

I've been a huge Thunderbird fan for the last 2 years, but within the last couple months, I've found myself leaning heavily towards Gmail. It has several features that kill not just Thunderbird, but most desktop email clients.

First, is the intelligent grouping of emails into "conversations". This makes reading email almost as easy as reading threads in a newsgroup, since my attention isn't constantly being switched between different topics. I use Gmane to read mailing lists as newsgroups in Thunderbird, but Gmail maintains conversations for all types of email.

Second, is Gmail's default emphasis on archiving email and permanently deleting spam. This makes searching old emails very easy, without having to worry about seeing spam. The closest thing to archiving in Thunderbird is never emptying your trash. And any spam that's found is first placed in a "junk" folder then dumped to trash with the rest of your good email, defeating the purpose of having a spam filter. Plus, I don't think Thunderbird can search the email's body.

Third, as an Internet application, it can be accessed anywhere from any operating system with a web browser, and always has the latest bug-fixes.

Fourth, is Google's Calendar. Yeah, it's not strictly a part of Gmail, but it's included with your Google account and I've found it pretty invaluable. My favorite feature is the ability to send event notifications to your cell phone. There's currently no comparable open source calendar application. Evolution has a clunky, unintuitive interface and tends to crash a lot. Mozilla Sunbird was promising but now seems dead or inactive. I haven't tried Kalendar, so it may be decent, but KDE isn't known for it's simple and intuitive interfaces.

Probably the only complaint I have about Gmail, is the spell checker's inability to learn unknown words or proper nouns.

Other than that, Gmail's a pretty solid application. Although, like Jeremy, I still use Thunderbird, but in a secondary role maintaining a back up of my email on my local machine.

Jeremy, do you have any update on Yahoo's IMAP plans? With the excellent hosting packages now available, IMAP would make Yahoo an easy "comprehensive" choice for a small business in my view. Without IMAP, how are you all removing attachments, which for me would rather quickly increase the size of an Internet-based, POP-only account above any current limit? Thanks for any unofficial tips.

I don't have anything yet, no.

I used to love Thunderbird but I got a little tired of duplicating the settings and duplicating the spam for each computer I use (several each - W32 & Linux). Now, with Gmail there is only one inbox, one spam folder, etc. It works great for me.

I did NOT change my addresses either. I just had my ISP forward my other accounts to gmail. When I reply, it even uses the original address(es) so the people I send mail to do not have a new address to contend with.

I have several accounts and my wife and I share them (work related and personal) My gmail account sat basically dormant for quite a while, but as my prejudices against google were dispelled (google's support for firefox and linux helped convince me - though it alarms others, I know...) I have been VERY satisfied with gmail and use it basically exclusively.

In Firefox, I set up a bookmark folder called Gmail Office (with Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Space) and I can load that all in one move and I am pretty happy.

What I would REALLY be happy with would be Thunderbird as a front end for gmail and OpenOffice with remote storage (with a more reliable system than gmailfs... But that is a different topic I guess.

I totally agree that emails should be (when possible) read by a server based application. This way one can access his emails from anywhere, even from a cybercafe. But servers are like home computers, they are not free!

I would never use gmail, only because of the advertisements.
I also don't understand why you all bother about the spam when gmail offers you advertisements with exactly the same contents?

Also, gmail is not open-source. When signing up, you agree that the company google can 'read' your emails and use all the information to whatever ends. So i wouldn't recommend using gmail for work related emails.

gmail is not configurable. Any other app could do what gmail does. And will, in some months. We can discuss to know if gmail was the first one to provide this or that feature, but we all know that it takes maximum 6 months before the good features are copied into all other similar programmes.

fast servers, high bandwith, and huge storage space are not free. When the advertisement market will be less lucrative, be ready to start paying for using your good old gmail account(s)...

Thanks for this post. I found it through a Google search on Gmail vs Thunderbird.

The one reason that has deterred me from moving completely to Gmail is actually the storage space- I have all my mails from nearly 4 years ago, and with all my accounts, it's more than 2GB and growing every day.

Short of opening several different email accounts, is there a way to tackle this in Gmail? I don't like the multiple Gmail accounts option because I haven't found a way yet to login to different accounts in different tabs of Firefox- I either get errors or the login goes to the inbox of the account that is already logged in.

If I could find solutions to these two issues, I might switch to Gmail.

I actually switched to gmail after going on vacation overseas and discovering how long it took to check my email and do simple tasks using other services. My comcast account took up to half an hour to get to my mail page whereas gmail loaded up instantly even with the ridiculously slow connection. I was practically without communication due to having to buy internet time in 15 minute blocks and the long loading times for email services. Next time i'll be prepared

I totally agree that GMail's search is better (What makes Google so famous anyway). Thunderbird has a poor index engine that makes searching so cumbersome and time-consuming.

I however stress the point that, GMail is good at searching emails and some emails coming from a particular ID. Thunderbird might win the case over stringent searches (very rare however) like finding a mail sent to you on a specific date, at a specific time. There may be powerful addons that give more functionality by the way.

Which is better? Comparing these two programs against each other is senseless--the newest version of Thunderbird can integrate a GMail account. To say "vs." is implying that they are completely different options from one another in accomplishing the same thing. This is just untrue. They work hand in hand offering features to help the other one.

Pierre--there's a SIGNIFICANT difference between GMail's ads and the spam I get in GMail and other email services.

First, the spam I receive is all about viagra and the like (rather annoying and rude, if you ask me!). Google's ads are targeted to match the content of the email, which typically doesn't involve viagra spin-offs.

Secondly, I've only had 2-3 messages out of thousands slip past the spam filter. Ever. I've been using it for 2.5 years now.

I've always used GMail. Nowdays I needed a desktop application for the company mail so i decided to try Thunderbird and it works great. Then i thought of having Thunderbird as my only email client, so i activated POP on GMail and started forwarding all my mails to thunderbird. But then i realized one thing, since i've been using thunderbird to SEND my mails with the outgoing server as smtp.google.com i recieve a copy of every mail i sent in GMail, i mean the web app. So i need to go every now and then to the web app and mark all those mails as read... Is there any way to have those mails still coming to the inbox in the web app but not having to check on them every month???? Any comments are welcome.

I am getting a bit sick of the Thunderbird instabilites and programming.

Looking forward to dumping Thunderbird for Gamil.

These are fairly typical TB issues.

This is a recurrent bug, where the password manager suddenly dumps the ability to send mail via gmail.

And we get the fun issue of the email refusing to send AND NO way to stop the program from FLASHING in the task bar - which is annoying.

I mean who are the geniuses that set that to repeat for ever - without the password manager taking a dump.

Tweak UI doesn't work on it and there is NO "do not flash in the taskbar" OFF SWITCH.

I get asked to repeatedly enter my password... and because this doesn't work - then I have to go through the bullshit of going online because there are NO help files downloaded with the program.

(Duh - smart move that)

And then I find that I get told to go OPTIONS, PRIVACY, PASSWORDS and into "Edit SAVED Passwords" only to find that there is NO list of saved or never to be saved pass words.

The only way to get around this is to ignore all the stupid "programming" advice and use this

Mail PassView v1.50 - Extract lost email passwords
Copyright (c) 2003 - 2009 Nir Sofer

from here.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mailpv.html

And the thing is that the password I had was the right one, the program has had this long standing fault of dumping it's ability to use the stored password which is not saved when you reenter it anyway.

There is the really irritating nag flashing in the task bar - that cannot be switched off - every time an email hangs or doesn't send.

Then the only way to view the password/s is to use a "crack" for want of a better word because the stupid program won't show them.....

And most of these faults or idiot design features have been going on for YEARS, with no end in sight.

The fourth point of complaint is that I like to use HTML emails, and yet "the geniuses" who created this software, think that it's cleverer to to make everyone use a bastardised version of a word processing program with automatic formatting.

I prefer to use the ONE font and font size all the way through, and yet, when I insert a picture or what ever, the automatic programming cuts in and shoves these absolutely idiotic reformatting of the email in my face.

BODY.

Paragraph

Headings - 1 - 6

Address

Preformat;

Along with---------------

Variable Width

Fixed Width

And a stack of other fonts.

All I want is to have the document locked into say Courier new, Size 14 - all the way through.

Yet, everyone either ignores this request or the option of keeping an emailer as an emailer instead of a word processor - is never attended too.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Then toss in the way the "fucking idiots" have programmed in the "politically correct" function of inserting text instead of pictures so blind people can understand what the picture is.

I mean fuck me... I don't email any blind people, so to have to constantly rejig the "Alternative TEXT" to off for the insertion of images, is just bullshit.

It should only be there as a choice to switch ON, not the default to switch off....

I mean the people who do the Mozilla Thunderbird program do so much fucking really stupid shit.

And this has been going on for such a LONG time....

It reminds me of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (add libbing a bit here), of building light switches that are programmed to tell and ask you, "Did you know that turning the light off with make the room go dark? If you want to proceed with deilluminating the room, please press yes, if you would like to room to remain lit - please pres no."

I mean this is how uttely fucking stupid some of the ideas that these committees dream up and impose upon the users.

Uggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh Bring on the Gmail client - get rid of the committee of idiots.

The great groupie culture of the Thunderbird user base...

"Were all clones".... "Well I'm not"

to the person who commented last.

dude.... get a life!

u rant so much! and for what? u dont even fuckin pay for these services. go build ur own thunderbird moron!

guess u wud be better off without email.

I agree with "#" on one thing at least...

...having to 'check' "Don't use alternate text" on EVERY image/picture that you insert in email is a ROYAL pain in the @ss.

So, # has at least one point.

I do not understand what all this talk about what is faster, or that the data is only available on the pc with thunderbird.
If all your accounts are accessed as IMAP and you use the "Google Contacts" add-on then it does not matter how many Thunderbird and Gmail are being accessed at the same time as they will all have access to the same data and contacts.
Also uncheck the "Keep message for this account in this computer" there is no need to download every message to each computer, leave it on the server until needed.

I use gmail all the time. I have all my mail forwarded to one gmail account. Then I download it all into Outlook Express!

I can respond from the different email accounts from OE, and I find formatting and sending from OE much nice than Gmail (gmail has this crazy backup that is invoked every few seconds and interferes with creating emails).

Gmail has a super search and great filter/label capability.

So, combined, they're fine. For MY style.

Several years ago, my nerdy brother told me about Gmail so I thought I should try it. It took me a little while to get used to the different formatting, but I eventually grew to love it.