Moomalade

Thunderbird 2.0 is out. Yay! Nothing earth shattering on the release notes though.

This doesn’t have anything to do with Thunderbird 2.0 directly, but I have a rant to vent about GMail.

All my work related email is stored in a spiffy Exchange server at work. Exchange is pretty fab, you can access your email through IMAP, MAPI, POP3, tunnel it over HTTP, from a web page, on your mobile, over VPN and likely other ways I don’t know about. Its collaboration features are great, including sharing and delgation of your folders, tasks, calendars and appointments. For me though, the one feature I’ve gotten used to is having a single inbox, a single set of folders. My folders are the same wether I access them at home or work using Outlook, or on my laptop using Thunderbird. If I reinstall my computer I don’t have to worry about my email, it’s instantly there, along with the journalling history and sent items. This isn’t a Microsoft Exchange sales pitch, so I’ll move on, but suffice to say, I’m happy with the Outlook and Exchange combination.

I totally forgot all this when I set up my new personal email account.

I chose GMail to handle my consolidated personal email. I figured it had great storage, great reliability, and a great interface. Plus, it was free. I set about consolidating my email into a new account on my domain with Google Apps. This wasn’t easy and I ended up downloading my email via POP3 into Thunderbird and using gExodus to foward it back to my new account. I also tried GMail Loader but it had a tendancy to mangle my mailing list and newsgroup headers quite badly. This should have really been much eaiser and I was suprised Google offered no migration tools. You can’t even migrate from one GMail account to another! In comparision, to move email between accounts in Outlook or Thunderbird you drag it.

Once my mail was safely settled into my new account, all was well until I realised I had lost the feature I’d become most used to — just accessing my inbox from wherever I liked. I would have to access my email through the GMail web interface as the only external access method provided by GMail was POP3. If I looked at my email on my laptop using Thunderbird it would throw my home computer out of sync, since the messages would have been downloaded onto my laptop. Using the web interface would have been okay, except I’m not over the moon about the GMail interface. It’s passable but it’s not as good as Outlook and it’s not as good as Thunderbird. The desktop clients are much richer, more responsive require less interaction and load faster.

I’m left with several options:

1. Learn to love the GMail web interface and ditch my pre-Web 2.0 attachment to desktop applications.
2. Wait for GMail to provide IMAP support.
3. Ditch the whole Google idea and move to an exsiting IMAP provider.

I’m undecided. Even though I’m more at home with the GMail interface than before and I’ve invested time into setting up filters and labels, I’m still edging on option 3. I’ve found myself viewing most of my mailing lists at home through the Gmane news service using Thunderbird, only checking my gmail account perhaps once a day.

As a side note to all of this, it does strike me that it’s not in Google’s interest to offer a good method of access to my email that precludes using the web interface and seeing the adverts that pay for their service. It’s in their business interest to promote vendor lock in, the same way Microsoft promote platform lock in.