PatrickMD.net

I gave up Thunderbird this past week, and redirected all of my mail to Gmail.

I used to have two different mail accounts within Thunderbird and a Gmail account for newsletter subscriptions. The idea was that I would separate my frequently read academic mail from my less-frequently read personal and bulk mail.

Over time, these distinctions blurred so that I was always checking all of my accounts in a cumbersome way. I wasn’t seeing any benefits from separating my mail accounts.

There are two proverbial straws that led me to dump Thunderbird entirely:

1. Starting a few months ago, I began to spend more time away from my laptop. Where I work there are always computers about, so I used the webmail feature for each of my accounts. I found that A) I hated the squirrelmail-based interfaces, B) disliked having to check in three places, and C) lost the ability to easily keep sent mail.
2. Over the past six months Thunderbird has become less effective at stopping spam. I wrote about this before, but my attempts to improve Thunderbird’s spam filtering just weren’t working.

I thought about these issues for a few weeks, and one day I just entered in forwarding orders to redirect each of my email addresses to my gmail address. I haven’t looked back since.

So far, Gmail has done a great job at spam filtering, missing about 3-4 messages per day. Thunderbird would miss at least 10 each day. The false positives have been boring newsletters I had opted in for but didn’t really want.

I have been surprised to find that I enjoy the conversation feature much more than I thought I would. It’s easy to keep my inbox only populated with the threads I want to hear about – everything else goes to Archive (or Trash.)

I didn’t feel the need to import all of my email into Gmail, but I had one folder that needed to get in there. For that import I used Mark Lyon’s Gmail loader. This was difficult for me to set up since my network provider requires SSL connections to the local mail server and blocks outbound connections to port 25. However, once I found a mail server/port combination that worked it was able to trickle messages from my old mailbox into Google Mail. Another problem that’s tough to fix is that the emails appear with the date/time they were received by Gmail, not the date they were actually composed.

I found some great customizations for Gmail, particularly Gmail Skins. I set it up so my Google Calendar is on the right for easy consultation.

It’s bittersweet to have moved away from Thunderbird, because I’ve been a huge Thunderbird fan since I ditched Microsoft Outlook in 2000. For the past few days, I have been reflexively hitting the Thunderbird icon and then realizing, after it finds no new mail, that I’m not using it anymore.

Tags:   Email · thunderbirdNo Comments