You decode me right through baby right through like an mp3 baby right through right through.

[reddragdiva]

• NotN: Barrowman exposes himself on radio; "Community Payback" vests revitalise low-end clothing market; New plans for unemployed and immigrants in Queen's Speech.

• DailyPhoto seems to be much more popular than DailyPic.co.uk. The geeky focus, the text and all the Creative Commons attribution the whiniest creator could ask for encourage people to propagate links. Good!

I used to read my mail on mutt on a terminal. I ended up not quite reading stuff ever. No folders, tagging or spam filtering.

Then I read it on Thunderbird on my PC. Folders, tagging and good spam filtering (though you still have to download the stuff). But somehow I never quite got around to answering what I meant to or reading much of my list mail (150+ messages a day).

Now I use Gmail. I pretty much live in it. (I only use IM at all because Gmail comes with a Jabber client.) I keep up with my mail! Mostly.

The key innovation of Gmail for me is that mail is in three states: unread, read and archived. The third category, I can't see it but it's there in a search.

Other nice innovations I like: the conversation threading (I now read my list mail), good search, even better spam filtering than Thunderbird.

Keeping one's life on someone else's commercial server is risky in obvious ways. So it'd be nice to have something as usable as Gmail on my desktop.

So. What would it take to add the following features to Thunderbird?

• Three-state mail, with the archived stuff disappearing from sight but still in search.
• really good full text search, so archived stuff can actually be found. (Text search! It's a SOLVED PROBLEM!)
• I can live without the conversation threading, but that'd be nice too. I like the Gmail interface much better than the standard-since-1994 three-pane interface.

What are my chances on this?

Comments

[reddragdiva]

Google want you to use their web service ('cos it's got ads on it - and sometimes they're well worth it for the inadvertent humour), but they make your Gmail mailbox completely accessible via IMAP, so any current desktop mail client can talk to it freely - you can download your mail automatically without affecting the contents of your Gmail on the Google server.

So it's just a Simple Matter Of Programming! %-D

[themadcatlady.livejournal.com]

Yes, I already use IMAP with my Gmail in Thunderbird - I still find it much slower than using the Gmail web service though. Even worse, using GMail IMAP in Windows Live Mail, it´s *horrendously* slow loading. Using Thunderbird is good, but I demand MORE SPEED! ;)

[reddragdiva]

It's slower because you have to download the mail to use it - in the webmail, you only see the list until you click on the mail. Remember the olden days, pressing "Get mail" each morning and watching the message counter ticking?

[themadcatlady.livejournal.com]

Hey, I know how IMAP works. ;)

It was, however, MUCH slower when using Windows Live Mail (hell knows why, but after a few weeks I didn´t want to put up with it any longer), so I switched back to Thunderbird with my Gmail.

[thorfinn]

You telling Thunderbird to cache copies of everything locally? If you are, and it's still slow, then the programmers need a good kick up the bum.

[themadcatlady.livejournal.com]

Aha! That would be "Download Messages for offline use when going offline" in the Offline Settings? And there´s me thinking that would be ON by default. Have turned that on now. Probably wasn´t ON by default in Window Live Mail (which I tried previously) either!

Thanks for that tip.

[thorfinn]

Oops. :-) Yes, that should speed things up rather a lot. Search via IMAP is pretty poor. Search on local cache is going to be buckets faster. Even without a nice index and such, puters and disk is fast enough these days that just scanning the whole local copy is actually not too bad.

[themadcatlady.livejournal.com]

I don´t use search very often anyway - I have an amazing filing system, even if I say so myself, and I file things away straight away usually, so I usually find things just by looking in the corresponding folders. I *am* German after all, so being über-organised is my perogative! ;)