Gmail.

Really? Why do you say that?

@garydale email clients are stupid, annoying, and plain out retarded. Having your email accessible in only one place defeats the purpose of having an email, you may as well ask for letters. Gmail you can maintain and check online.

I also cast my vote for gmail!

Great Question, @garydale! I’ve been meaning to ask about this myself. As a Web developer, over time I grew to openly detest Microsoft for their business tactics. From their very first product, MS-DOS (acquired as QDOS, AKA Quick and Dirty Operating System) forward, they have been the innovator of roughly ZERO products. They buy products someone else has invented, and do a bit to modify them or sometimes nothing at all more than renaming and rebranding them. Instead, they invest heavily in FUD engineering. That is, they generate Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about the competitor’s products, some of which were actually technically superior to the one Microsoft had chosen at the time. Their basic marketing strategy is, “Buy our product, or explode!” The corporate world responds like Pavlov’s dog to FUD. And with corporate sales locked up for each new product, Microsoft had the advertising dollars and perceived market dominance to destroy any competitor who refused to

To escape Microsoft’s FUD Hell, I adopted the Eudora Pro(e-mail_client) Email Client from Qualcom in early 2003 rather than lock myself in to Microsoft’s Outlook or Outlook Express (for the home user). My main reason aside from simple disgust at Microsoft’s thuggish business practices was that hackers were targeting Outlook. I had a router with strong encryption, but why adopt the software every hacker on Earth was targeting? So I’ve beem using Eudora since it was developed. I was devastated in 2006 when I heard from Qualcom that they were ending development on Eudora. By that time, I have a huge investment in email filing system to run my Web development business.

So rather than risk havoc in moving all my Eudora messages and categories to Outlook, I hung in there to see what would happen next. Naturally, I was thrilled at the announcement of the Thunderbird Open Source project being managed by Mozilla, I was totally on board.

I’ve been using the latest release as each new realase number hitsd the street. Here are the things that are either missing, or that I don’t yet see a way to do in the new product. I can’t create a Sig file, I have instead been opening a separare copy of my old Eudora and copying my Sig file from it onto the bottom of each new wmils

Also, the new Eudora doesn’;t seem to provide any way to generate stationery. In old Eudora, you could write boilerplate file and simply fill in the addresse/s, bubject line, etc. The bulk of the enail is already written, and just needs the details like addressee, subject, etc. Again, I am copying the stationery from the existing

If there are solutions to these problems that some of you are familiar with—ways that the New Eudore OSE supports—please post them.

The biggest problem I am having with Gmail is that it is very limited on the mail merge side of things, which I need. They have one function that can be used via Googe Docs but it must use the Gmail address and cannot be modified in style (or at least easily). This is why I was looking at Opera or Thunderbird. Though I like Thunderbird’s apps some of the things I read about it aren’t the greatest. Namely that the mails don’t necessarily look the same when arriving in Outlook.

@garydale Email forwarding, you can set gmail up to forward emails to your main inbox from other accounts, I believe this or one of the other features would suit your needs.

I would also vote for Gmail, but if you’re really dead set on a client, Thunderbird because it’s open source. But I much prefer just opening Gmail to using a client.

I’m gonna go against the grain here and say that in a business setting, which @garydale seems to be in, a client can make sense. I was under the impression gmail cannot send from custom domains like support@garydale.com, for example unless you had the entire site on google apps, which I’d assume it is not. From a professional standpoint, it might make sense to go with a client in that respect. Correct me if gmail can send from custom domains not under google apps, though.

That being said, I use gmail, but if I was to pick one I’d go with Thunderbird. It’s under more active development and I’ve found it to be a lot less memory intensive on older computers. As for emails showing up differently, that could be a problem of the past. Rich text formatting seems fairly consistent across platforms nowadays.

@garydale The Qualcom version of Eudora had Personalities which let you set up separate mail accounts each with its own settings and address book. The address book is powerful in both., It lets you set up main folders for major categories like Customers, Forums, Etc. Under each of these you can have sub-folders and sub-sub-folders and so on.

It appears that Thuderbird (Eudora OSE from Mozilla) managed this by the File >> New >>Mail Account and File >> New >> Other Accounts to switch between accounts. I haven’t had any need of it, so I haven’t tested it. But you could download a free copy and play with it to see how closely it meets your needs.

I know there is a Thunderbird app for mail merge. I am assuming that Opera and Eudora have this ability as well?

@garydale I know Eudora does. I havent’t any experience with Opera.

You should definitely look at TrulyMail. It has delayed sending and so very much more. I’ve been using it for a while and prefer it over Outlook and Thunderbird (used both for years and turned away). One of my favorite features about TrulyMail is that they keep adding new features every month or so.