I recently purchased a new notebook. And as always I vowed to try and rid myself of the evil that is Microsoft! This time around I downloaded Go-OO (based on Open Office) to replace Office – so far so good. Next in line was an Outlook alternative. I initially installed Thunderbird. My situation involved multiple e-mail accounts from Yahoo and gmail to various POP accounts that I have somehow managed to accumulate over the years. I wanted a solution where I could have one point of access to all of them without having to go online if I didn’t have to. So I set up all my accounts on Thunderbird and was happy for a few days…
Zimbra?
Doing a bit of web investigation I came upon Zimbra mail client(?), recently bought by Yahoo. Having a Yahoo e-mail account, I decided to investigate Zimbra as an alternative to Outlook. Initially I got exited, I could add my other POP account to retrieve mail, while I could use my Yahoo mail as an on/off line synchronised mailbox.
It only took me 3 days to bin it! I was horrified at the application overhead, averaging over 100Mb of RAM for the java based application plus another 30 odd Mb for the Zimbra serive! What the hell? Another down side was that the Yahoo mail support is almost, but no quite, IMAP. You can synchronise online folders offline. So I happily started creating folders and sub folders via the Zimbra desktop app only to realize later that these folders were exclusively local. OK I thought, so ‘ll create them online. Yes you can, BUT you cannot create sub folders and you cannot edit these folders from the desktop. OK that was it I had enough.
Thunderbird & gmail
Luckily I haven’t uninstalled Thunderbird by this time yet! I then went odd to my gmail account online and discovered that it now supports IMAP! Very interesting, seems I’ve been out of the gmail loop a while! Another interesting thing I noticed was that you can set up your gmail account to fetch mail from other email accounts. Nice! Also by using Thunderbird I could set-up my gmail as an IMAP account Thus my mail always lives online, but is avalable locally on my computer and can be accessed from anywhere in the world via the web and IMAP (which I have on my Windows Mobile 6 phone), sweet!
So my current solution looks like this:
- gmail set-up to retrieve all my POP e-mails (you can configure up to 5 POP accounts to be fetched)
- my Yahoo account forwards all mails to my gmail account (depending on your account this may or may not be possible – alternatively you can set it up as a POP account)
- I have set up folders on my gmail via Thunderbird (to manage all my stored mail more organised than the Google one-size-fits-all method)
- I my gmail IMAP account on my Windows Mobile 6 HTC Touch phone – what a pleasure!
Calendar?
I hear you ask. Currently I syncronise my HTC’s WM6 calendar with my office’s corporate Exchange. Then I have GooSync running on my phone to synchronise all my appointments to my Google calendar and back. I have installed the Thunderbird 2-way google calendar synchronisation plugin. Now everything is in sync via Google Calendars. “Toight, thoight loike a toiger!”
Again so far so good – get away from me you evil Outlook!