Comments on: Are Desktop Email Clients a Dying Breed?

By: Daniel Brown

Daniel Brown — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:26:41 +0000

I use thunderbird as well as my official email address on gmail.

By: Trey

Trey — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:19:00 +0000

I think email clients are here to stay.

By: Scott Jarkoff

Scott Jarkoff — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:26:16 +0000

I have and actually used it a bit before the demo expired. I forget why I stopped using it – maybe it had something to do with the OTA sync with the iPhone?

By: JoshuaRJones

JoshuaRJones — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 11:37:50 +0000

Have you looked up BusySync for syncing your Google Calendars.

By: Rene

Rene — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 02:28:28 +0000

Seeing how extensively desktop mail clients are used in large corporate offices, I don't see them disappearing anytime soon. Everywhere I worked so far, probably starting in the early 90s, Outlook was used and iin one rare occassion it was Lotus Notes. It is almost too embedded in office culture to have a desktop mail client.
Personally, I would need some really strong persuasion to move from Outlook to webmail, because I really don't see any advantage to use web-based mail over desktop mail client.

By: Jeroen Mulder

Jeroen Mulder — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:29:30 +0000

I purchased a license for Mailplane yesterday. Before I was running Fluid for a couple of months. but running Gmail in a tab in my browser does not give me some of the integration a regular desktop client does, but Mailplane is on the right track solving those problems.

Before, I was a die-hard Thunderbird user --both on Windows and OSX-- since its initial release. I liked the speed and offline access in combination with Gmail's IMAP. For the last year I was running nightly builds of Thunderbird 3. The single reason I switched to web-based Gmail is conversation tracking, speed and Gmail Labs. For some reason it just does it all a bit better than what I have been used to.

But that is for my personal e-mail. For work I use Outlook 2007 and I doubt that could ever be replaced by a webbased system. Partly because of the client (speed and search is great for large inboxes), but also because it integrates with other systems.

For me, desktop email clients are not a dying bread unless they can solve the access-everywhere problem. With Gmail I can access my e-mail from home on OSX, from work on Windows, using the Gmail client on my Blackberry or Sony Ericsson or wherever I want to. And what I get on all those devices is still powerful software, not some dumbed web interface (I'm looking at you, Microsoft). I'd be fine with using a client, because I'm sure they can offer some good things, but the infrastructure and development effort behind it needs to be better than say Gmail.

By: Scott Jarkoff

Scott Jarkoff — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:56:15 +0000

Glad to hear you were able to get it working on both sides.

As an aside, I am in a similar predicament because I am using the OTA
Google Contact and Calendar syncing on my iPhone. So because of that
the OS X Address Book can no longer sync contacts with Google. Looks
like I might need to investigate a third-party solution like what
you're using, so I can marry everything up.

By: JoshuaRJones

JoshuaRJones — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:53:46 +0000

I used the Google syncing via Address Book. The only problem is I spend a majority of my time at my iMac in the office, and the ability to sync through Address Book to Google only shows up if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, and have connected it to your system. I only connect my iPhone to my laptop at home. (Address Book was never showing the sync option on my iMac, so I never dealt with it)

So I had to use Back to My Mac to connect to my laptop at home, and enable the syncing that way.

In short, I was a complete moron about the subject. I am very pleased with the results though.

By: Scott Jarkoff

Scott Jarkoff — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:35:57 +0000

Glad to hear you got it working. I was going to ask why you just don't use the built-in Gmail contact syncing, but I guess there's no need to ask. Though, I will ask this – is that what you used?

By: Scott Jarkoff

Scott Jarkoff — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:34:51 +0000

What is it about desktop email clients that you find easier to work with than web-based email?

By: JoshuaRJones

JoshuaRJones — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 07:03:19 +0000

While I do agree that desktop clients allow you to work with multiple e-mail accounts, Im finding less and less people want to juggle with that. I use to have two e-mail accounts, until I finally shut the old account down. I am now just very selective about the information I give away.

GMail is a web service, and I have struggled with the idea of switching to web based only for a few reasons. One is the awesome features you get from the Labs section (like having gmail scan your e-mail for the words attachment, and warn you that you forgot to attach said attachment, or un-send an e-mail) Another is the ability to pretty much access that service from any computer. You don't need to install anything.

The only thing thats stopping me is the fact that I use my Macs for everything and having my address book always synced is important. When I find a solution to keep my GMail contacts and my Address Book synced, than I won't ever use a desktop client again.

By: YorickPeterse

YorickPeterse — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:47:23 +0000

I don't think desktop email clients are dying, and I don't think they will die very soon. I use Thunderbird to acces both my Hotmail Email address and the Email address that belongs to my website, why ? Because I find it way much easier to work with than using a web service.