E-mail Clients

Perhaps I need to get with the times or something but I’ve always enjoyed using Yahoo for e-mail verses gmail even though I have accounts with both. In fact, I have far too many email accounts and it’s staring to get to me. I recently contemplated trying to consolidate accounts but I do like having my accounts separated as follows:

• Account for immediate family which I also use for most websites I sign up at
• Account for friends and colleagues (since I’ve never used my work email address for personal matters)
• Account for recruiters and job hunting/applications
• Account for my photo site
• Account for selling stuff on Craigslist
• Misc accounts on gmail when I contemplating switching to their more robust service

One of the main reasons I’ve hesitated to really use my gmail accounts is I heard what is deleted isn’t really gone from the servers. Of course that could hold true for Yahoo as well but I was comfortable just leaving everything with Yahoo until recently when they updated their mail yet again. Now when I type a message there’s this huge delay between what I’ve typed and what appears on screen. Even worse is half the time what I’ve type doesn’t appear at all. How frustrating!

Today I went on a hunt to find an email client I could use to manage all my email accounts and came across Mozilla Thunderbird. It’s a bit early for a final verdict, but I do like a lot of things about it and some things are just annoying.

First, the things I like –

• It supports multiple email accounts (and I can add a column called “Account” so I am constantly aware of which account I’m in when browsing messages).
• I can set it up as IMAP so all the email is retained on the server but use the interface to “clean up” my folders.
• Composing an email does away with that hellish delay I get when trying to write an email directly in yahoo mail.

Now the things I don’t like –

• It errors out more than not when trying to access and download new mail. This is a fundamental action so it’s perplexing to me why this continues to happen.
• There isn’t a way, from what I can tell thus far, to use a master inbox for all email accounts so you’re not constantly switching back and forth as new messages come in.
• Whenever I click on an email account it insists on expanding the account so I see all the underlying folders which means I can’t see all the other email accounts at a quick glance.

I did install an extension called QuickFolders that I used to create short-cuts to each account’s inbox, but you’d think there would be a better way to manage multiple accounts. I am willing to bet the majority of people use more than one email address on a daily basis.

So if anyone can recommend a better email client to manager multiple accounts I’m all ears.