I would like to know which e-mail/calendar application you are using, or which one you would prefer to use if you weren’t constrained by platform, and why. Your responses may include applications that run under Windows, Linux or Mac.
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Evolution 2 versus Thunderbird versus The Rest
4 replies on “Evolution 2 versus Thunderbird versus The Rest”
I use gmail for my personal mail and I have to use outlook at work. I follow Merlin Mann’s “inbox zero” program so I have achieved agnosticism when it comes to which application I use as features other than being able to move messages around manually are meaningless.
That said, I haven’t bothered trying anything else…
I use Evolution. Were I not constrained by platform, I would probably ue Evolution, but… not in the way of someone who loves the software. Evolution’s search is pretty good though; last time I tried other options, it easily beat everything else.
I have used most other things in the past – Outlook, Thunderbird, Mail.app – and I don’t like *any* of them, including Evolution. All of them have overly complicated interfaces, and none of them are great when it comes to IMAP-SSL… though I understand that to be the fault of IMAP servers as much as anything. Every mail app so far has gotten on my nerves after about a week.
I’ve started using gmail more, at least partially because I expect to lose my current work address at some stage, but also because it’s better for conversing with people. The one function that gmail (IMO) sucks at is reading mailing lists; maybe there is a way to get used to it, but I can’t imagine following long convoluted threads through its interface.
I primarily use gmail for my mail, however I also pop the messages using Apple Mail (however this is really just for backup purposes). I like my mail to be accessible from any machine without me having to set up different software on different platforms, and so that it is easy to access when travelling. Previously I used pine in a terminal on a server where I forwarded all of my mail. I switched to gmail because it means that I don’t have to keep my own mail server running. It’s also a lot easier to view non-text attachments now :) I’m not an email power user – I don’t set up filters or do anything tricky – I like gmail because I keep all of my mail in my inbox and just search when I need to find things, and gmail seems to be designed for this. I have also tried thunderbird, evolution, iCal and google calendar, but I can never stick to using them – I prefer just to keep lists of things that I need to do.
Oh, yeah: Calendars.
At work we are compelled to use Oracle’s calendar product which is a mysterious thing that works as well or better that Outlook/calendar in my limited experience. I would rather use a paper diary, and I have begun too again if only so I can take my diary with me. “Synchronising” paper and Oracle isn’t as sucky as I thought it would be, but I’ve only been doing it a few days.
I also agree with Kai and Anna on the relative goodness of gmail. I have a very small number of filters set up in Gmail to handle the notifications I get from the forum I moderate. Everything else gets into the inbox and a great many things, mostly mailing lists, get deleted unless I find them directly relevant. Conversations with mates get archived. My gmail “inbox” contains