I’ve been looking into mail clients lately. At work I use Outlook, and for my other mailing needs I have Gmail. Neither of these options are bad, but I’m also not too excited about both. So I’ve been looking around and found a few options and I’m now using a few. I can’t give you any definite judgment just yet, but here’s a list of what I found and liked.
Most e-mail clients have very similar functionality. I’m looking for a few things:
- It should be able to handle large amounts of mail
- Search and archiving should be as easy and quick as possible
- I’d prefer it to be free
- If possible, make it visually attractive
Based on those criteria, I’ve selected two candidates, Postbox is the one I’m currently trying out and I’ll switch to Thunderbird next week.
Postbox
Postbox has its roots on the Mac and it shows in the interface. It’s very clean and functional. I also liked the almost automatic configuration, you fill in your e-mail address and password and it figures out your mail settings. I suppose this won’t work for all providers, but it worked flawlessly for my accounts. If you’re used to Gmail’s threading, don’t fear, Postbox has it too.
Postbox has both a free and a payable version. I’m currently trying the full version, but I’m not sure if they are worth the price.
One thing I think I’d find useful is a global inbox view. I couldn’t find this kind of view, but it might be lurking somewhere. Otherwise I haven’t really found much wrong with Postbox, so I’ll see how the trial continues.
Thunderbird
Thunderbird is Mozilla’s e-mail client. I’ve tried it a long time ago and wasn’t too impressed, but I have the feeling it deserves a new look. It took me some searching, but it appears Thunderbird also supports threading, so it seems to have very similar features as Postbox.
Thunderbird does have add-ons, which might be nice, I’ll have to check them out.
update: since I wrote this, I’ve been getting into Postbox (and liking it) and it looks like it is build on top of Thunderbird. Which means that it also supports the exact same add-ons that Thunderbird supports. Although this isn’t prominently displayed on their page, there is a section for compatible add-ons.
If you have a different favorite offline e-mail client, please let me know and share your choice in the comments. I’d love to have some other options.