| It's just a bit more snappy and has a few advanced but helpful features that gmail does not. For comparison... think about how it feels to work in Microsoft Word compared to Google Docs. You can do most of what you can do in Word in Google Docs, but there are helpful things in Word that just make it that much better. And it just feels a little better when you use it... thus, if you need to do really serious word processing, you do it in Word. Outlook and Thunderbird have a similar feeling when compared to gmail. It won't matter much if you are only sending 10 emails a day. But if you are sending 50 or 60 emails a day over multiple inboxes (particularly in the context of business email)... you might find it's a little easier to organize and respond to people in the desktop clients. In the case of Thunderbird, here are some features it has I probably couldn't live without: -Archiving split by Month (As a bonus there is also an easy shortcut key for archiving) -Open in thread (this is a little different than gmails as far as I understand in the way that thunderbird deals with split threads, which can be important in a business context where you have some replies only going to some people, others going to other people - it's easy to see this tree structure in Thunderbird) -Folders AND Tags (Thunderbird's Tagging and Folder system are separated, gmails is combined as far as I'm aware. As a bonus, Thunderbirds tags highlight emails in color for easy identification, and also have easy shortcuts) -Add-Ons (For example, I use a Thunderbird extension that can attach notes to an email message... which can then synchronize between computers which is useful for accounts where a lot of people access the inbox, but where sending an internal email would clog said inbox. For gmail, you can write web extensions, but Thunderbird has an ecosystem already pre-existing and mostly free) -Reminder if you use the word 'attach' and don't have an attachment (It sucks when you send out an email saying 'such is attached below and it's not actually there. Gmail might have this too now - have not checked.) These things all seem pretty small but they make a big difference in how I manage my email, and especially with Thunderbird, this is all customizable. Want Unified inboxes, or separate ones? Your choice. Want to see the cc's from an email as a column in your email list, but not the favorites ('important' tag in gmail) column? Your choice too. And there's a lot more options than just these, meaning you can really streamline your email process. And this just ... at least for me, makes enail a little less painful. Just my two cents :). |