The ultimate combination to suit your daily email needs. All these for the total price of nil –nada –nothing! Now, what more could you ask for?
Creating a gmail account is free. It offers pop and imap access (of course, imap will always be better than pop) to enable you to access your email and send messages using a desktop email client like Thunderbird (ditch Microsoft Outlook), as well as 6.5GB of message storage space (so far).
Mozilla Thunderbird is likewise free, created by the same creator of another internet tool and browser, Mozilla Firefox. Setting up Thunderbird to fetch and send gmail messages is easy. Just refer to this tutorial and you’re ready to go.
Mozilla Thunderbird community offers free addons like themes to style the looks of your desktop client window and extensions to better enrich your entire email experience. A sample theme is the one I’m using, a theme called “Aquabird Redone” to blend with my mac-like desktop theme.
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There are lots of Thunderbird extensions that may prove useful to other persons, but for me these two are indispensable:
- Enigmail – for ASYMMETRICAL encryption (remember the public and the private keys?) of email messages including attachments.
- Auto Zip Attachments – the name says it all. I believe “auto-zip” is automatically done in Lotus Notes, but in Microsoft Outlook…naahhhh! (ditch MS Outlook!)
You can look for more Thunderbird extensions and themes from here.
Now, that’s what I call, “Freedom!”
6 Comments
I would like to hear opinion from you. Why do you choose Thunderbird even though you can also read your emails from Gmail website? If you see, Gmail is faster than Thunderbird.
Hi CypherHackz, thanks for visiting my site. First of all, I’m not sure what you mean that Gmail is faster than Thunderbird. I mean, in what sense? For one, you can set up Thunderbird to download messages from Gmail so you can go back to them even though you are offline. Gmail is already great, adding an email desktop client is more awesome.
Add to that you can extend Thunderbird even better. There a lot of addons, just like I mentioned above, that will increase your efficiency in your daily workflow.
When you open Gmail, you are prompted with ads at the right hand corner of the screen. But in Thunderbird, those ads are stripped so that you’ll only see the message itself.
What I mean is in term of retrieving the emails in the inbox. If in Thunderbird, we need to wait for it to finish download all the headers of new emails in our Gmail inbox (using IMAP feature) and then if we want to read the new email, again, we need for Thunderbird to finish download the new email and open it.
But if we already in the Gmail, we only click on the subject and the email will be opened immediatly.
Well, if it’s the first time you set up Thunderbird, it surely will take time to download your gmail messages, especially if you already more than a gig of messages plus attachments. But you can set up Thunderbird to download all your messages including attachments (not just the headers), after which opening messages especially attachments will be faster.
If you wish, you can download your messages to your local machine, but that’s entirely another story. 😀
I have about 20000 emails in my Gmail inbox. And yes, I was just installed Thunderbird to test its performance and such. So far I am satisfied with its performance just it takes time to fecth emails from Gmail.
Btw maybe you can write an article about why people should use/read Gmail in Thunderbird. 🙂
Well, this article is actually the best I can come up with. 😀 You should also promote Thunderbird in your blog, so your friends will know. 😀