So I made this permanent switch this week from Mozilla Thunderbird to web-based Gmail.
In the past, I’ve used web-based Gmail when I’ve been away from home, or on campus, or on a different computer, say in a library, but I’ve always maintained my e-mail accounts using an e-mail application. In the days of old it was Eudora (see above). In more recent years it’s been Thunderbird. Since as long as I’ve had the Internet I’ve always used an e-mail application.
It began with my Internet Direct and the e-mail account from my ISP back in the mid-90′s. It was a POP account which meant you needed to use a piece of software to access it, there was no website you could go to to read your mail. Included on the Internet software CD-ROM was an early copy of Eudora, which could retrieve my e-mail through POP, so that’s what I used. Later, when Hotmail came along, I had moved on to Microsoft’s Outlook Express because of its ability to access Usenet. Still, I avoided jumping ship to a web-based e-mail when Microsoft upgraded Outlook Express to be able to retrieve e-mail from Hotmail accounts—it even did so ad-free.
When Gmail came along, except for the early invite-only beta portion, I largely managed to avoid the move to web-based e-mail, again. Now using Thunderbird, I still relied on software applications to read newsgroups and to check my mail and with Gmail’s IMAP service I was again able to check my e-mail and keep it synchronized across multiple computers, ad-free. By this time I had racked up more than one e-mail address as well. Thunderbird allowed me to easily check multiple accounts and newsgroups with no fuss and so again I skipped the switch to web-based e-mail.
But over the years it’s been nagging at me. With everything going web-based—e-mail, newsgroups, word processing and office suites—I’ve been seriously wondering why I’ve been such a hold out. Thunderbird, despite being a Mozilla application, hasn’t really been improving over the years in the same way that Firefox has been. The recent addition of a robust search function has been nice but, as far as I can tell, its half-way broken. Maybe the signs have been in the clouds all along because whenever I’ve needed to search my e-mail in a pinch, I’ve gone to the web-based Gmail version. And since the latest version things have been slow. I can wait upwards of thirty seconds while it loads my IMAP messages, at which time it’s completely frozen.
And so it goes. I have no point, or purpose, in using an e-mail application anymore. Thunderbird has become too slow and lacks any compelling features. I realized the other day that the only thing still keeping me tied to a program to check my e-mail was tradition. It’s the way I always did it—but it hadn’t been working in a long time.
So I’ve made the switch that I’m that much happier for it. I’ve realized that Gmail can organize my e-mails better than Thunderbird could; it can search better; it’s address book is just as good, nay, better; and it loads quickly. It can also check my other e-mail accounts, too but I think that I’ll set those to forward to my Gmail nonetheless. The day when your popularity and coolness was gauged by how many e-mail addresses you had (there was a time!) has passed.
It’s funny that for so many years I’ve been doing things a certain way simply because that’s the way I’ve always done them. You’d think for someone who stays on top of breaking technology trends, who likes computers and the Internet and all that kind of stuff, that I would be with it. It’s surprising, then, to realize that I’ve been stuck in the relative age of the dinosaurs for such a long time without even noticing. Huh.
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