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are email clients sofware a dead industry ?

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johnk:
I understand those who have given up trying manually to organise ever-growing numbers of emails.  Letting Gmail search take the strain is a logical approach.

It all depends how much control you want to maintain. Gmail is a step too far for me (in letting go), although I use a Gmail account for some unimportant stuff.

My main account is an IMAP account (using my own domain) through Fastmail. Solid performance and a slick, lean (if slightly old-school) web interface. Scripting allows me to do all my organising/filtering server-side, so email drops into Thunderbird already filtered by folder. Spam filters are so reliable I stopped checking my junk (after checking for several months without a single false positive). Terrible search, but...

Archivarius indexes IMAP accounts (i.e. it makes it own local, indexed text copy of the account). I'm sure it's not the only desktop search software to offer this feature.

But I agree with the original observation at the start of this thread about the slow development of email clients. I'm still looking for the perfect IMAP client. I swap between Thunderbird and Windows Live Mail...

Steven Avery:
Hi Folks,

   I think the slowdown in email clients to a crawl is a real problem.  Gmail is great for some stuff (e.g. I have an account for my programming-related personal mail so I can access it anywhere, and I auto-forward each mail to my ISP account).

   However for heavy volume usage, such as email forums, nothing is remotely close to an email client filtering into dozens or hundreds of boxes, having many views, having at-home composing, as some of the posts pointed out.  Eudora has been mine for years, noting the stability and industrial-strength filtering and very helpful user forums (when I looked at Thunderbird a while back the filtering was like toy-level, may be better by now).  I would always consider Becky, TheBat! and Poco as well as some others, especially now that Eudora has stopped development of the base product and been sort of absorded by Thunderbird.   

   However none of the alternatives has inspired great confidence (not to say they aren't good products, but I always would run into weaknesses) so I stick with Eudora while agreeing that the lack of the competition of a few years back has stifled development.  Gmail on one end, Outlook this and that on the other.

   I'll await and await.  (Eudora 7 is fine meanwhile.)

   There is a company that is trying to be a sucessor to Eudora, Infinity Data Systems, with a product called  "Odysseus", billed as "The Eudora Successor".  Perhaps it is in Beta, maybe.  Too soon to tell if it will pan out.

Shalom,
Steven

superboyac:
Like mouser, tamasd, kartal,  wraith808, mrainey and maybe others, all my mail is downloaded locally. I like having control of my files, and I don't find gmail's search tools more sophisticated than X1 or any other desktop search software for that matter. BTW, it's not because one downloads all emails locally that he/she necessarily spends hours sorting and classifying them.
-Armando (March 30, 2008, 05:53 PM)
--- End quote ---
Me too.  I have to have control of my files locally.  And I back everything up myself onto my own drives, my own way.  Just in general, I'm not a fan of the whole using web applications that is going to be the next big thing.  I know it's a fantastic evolution for 90% of the people out there who don't like to fiddle with software and don't have their computers meticulously set up to do every little thing just the way they want.  But for us powerusers, we need that control.  We want our stuff in our own house in our own hard drives.
And you know what else, web apps are great, but they just don't react the same way as a locally installed program.  It's hard to describe, I want to say the response time is slower, but a lot of them (like google) is pretty quick and fast.  There's just a "feel" to them that doesn't sit well with me.  There's a viscosity to them if that makes any sense.
For similar reasons, I'm not a huge fan of touch-screen technology.  It's really cool and useful for most people.  But it's not so great when you need to get down and dirty with what you're doing.  That iphone touch screen keyboard is just not as effective as a tactile keyboard...it's not possible.  That's how I feel about web apps vs local programs.
What's going to happen to our computers, then?  Our storage devices, our cpu, our memory?  What's the defining piece of equipment going to be?  The Ethernet port?  The speed of your ISP connection?  I would  completely rather have my own equipment limiting my processing capabilities rather than relying on the ISP connection.  Talk about reliability...unless there's a big revolution and everyone is able to get fiber optic, unlimited bandwidth connections (which will never happen in the near future).  It's waaaaay better to rely on your own equipment for all that stuff.

Archivarius[/url] indexes IMAP accounts (i.e. it makes it own local, indexed text copy of the account). I'm sure it's not the only desktop search software to offer this feature.
-johnk (March 30, 2008, 08:08 PM)
--- End quote ---
Seriously.  There is nothing any web app can do that some program can't do better.  The only advantage for web apps, like mouser said, and it's a pretty HUGE advantage, is the fact that you can access web stuff anywhere.

No, I am personally dreading the day that web apps take over.  But I'm not too worried, I'm certain that the local programs won't become obsolete, at least not in my lifetime. 

CodeTRUCKER:
I'm one of those people still living in the past i guess.. I like having control of my files, and I have no intention of switching from a local pc client to web based email.

The one area where web-based email really shines, in my opinion, is when you are traveling.
-mouser (March 29, 2008, 02:17 PM)
--- End quote ---

Would something like GoToMyPC allow one to have one's cake and eat it too? 

Armando:
If the remote PC is stable as a rock and really secured, I guess that would indeed be an ideal  solution -- well, for me at least.

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