Todoist+Thunderbird

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 7, 2013 at 08:53 PM

I’ve been using EM Client for a few months, and only as a complementary solution for working with Google Apps Mail when offline. I first read about it in Bits du Jour and chose to ignore it; I’ve seen many hopeful email clients from little known companies become abandonware and it’s not very funny when you have a lot of material locked in them (as I do in Calypso/Courier from ages back). Then I read that it was taken under the wing of Softmaker Office which I like and own a license to, and decided to try it out.

Some background: I turned to EM Client rather reluctantly and only after having been disappointed by several other IMAP capable clients: in Thunderbird I have lost messages and Postbox simply crawled and froze when trying to handle my mailbox (40% of a 25 Gb mailbox is no laughing matter)*. I would have liked a cross-platform solution (I often work on a Linux notebook) but, again, found none I felt satisfied with. As for Outlook, I’ve never managed to like it, and I know from reviews and colleagues’ experience that it doesn’t work well with Google Mail, so I never really considered it an option. Prior to Thunderbird and Postbox which didn’t last long with me, and before switching to Google Apps for our company mail, I used The Bat! for several years. Admittedly Google has done a good job of creating a web mail application whose strengths are difficult to reproduce in desktop clients—at least I have found none that satisfies me in this respect.

In this context, EM Client has—until now—proved OK. It’s fast; after the initial sync which might have taken a couple of days more, morning syncs happen very quickly. It’s rather smart: it will start by syncing the most recent messages in the inbox and then move on to other folders. It does automatic backups even if it isn’t running. It works well with various character sets. There may well be bugs, but I haven’t seen them yet. If I used it more often I might have seen them. It took me quite a while to find Thunderbird’s bugs and when I did I wasn’t happy.

Not sure if my experience helps. Once again, there’s few replacements for trying something one’s self. By the way, have you tried Daisho? http://www.daisho-blacksmith.com/en/software.html It’s also a German product and seemed to me quite well designed; unfortunately I found its IMAP capabilities rather limited.

*Yes, I know it’s a lot of mail. Part of the reason for wanting a desktop client is to clean up messages with huge attachments. Unbelievably, Google Mail cannot sort messages by size; the only way I have found is to sync the full mailbox in and offline reader and then use its own filters / sorting fields.