Why I’m Moving To Gmail and Ditching Thunderbird
I’ve recently decided to ditch my personal email account that I’ve paid for for the past few years in favor of Gmail. I used to access my old account with Mozilla Thunderbird, via IMAP, and that’s worked fine for a while. I decided to check out Gmail again, since I’m tired of spend $25 per year on my email account, and because I don’t really like the Yahoo interface, or the Hotmail interface. I found out that I’ve been pretty stupid in delaying my email address change.
First of all, Gmail is fast. I mean, super-fast. And, labels (which I realize are now in Thunderbird) are WAY better than my old style folder system. Multiple labels, multiple sort views, it just kicks ass. I have the power of Google to search through my email. Sure there are some advertisements, but who cares? I hardly notice them, and to be honest, once in a while they show me a product or service I might actually be interested in.
The detractors will tell me that my privacy is at risk. It might be, but so is the email that is downloaded to a local machine if someone really wants to take a look at it. In fact, Scott MacGregor’s main argument at this Wired.com article is, “Some users want to have their data local for privacy and control. Furthermore, you can integrate data from different applications on the desktop in ways that you can’t do with web-based solutions, unless you stick to web solutions from a single provider. For example, you can use your Outlook address book with Thunderbird. We’d like to continue to expand the kinds of data you can share between Thunderbird and other apps (both web and desktop applications).”
Okay, those are good points, but I think most users out there really just want to check their email. I don’t need to integrate my Mom’s Zucchini Casserole recipe, with anything on my computer. I just need to save the email and figure out where it is at a later date. Labeling under “Food” in Gmail has me there in a couple of seconds, without having to fire up my computer. Plus I can grab it from my mobile phone if necessary. Maybe I don’t get it because I’m not a power email user. I don’t get 100’s of emails each day to my personal account. I keep it simple that way, but then again, I think a lot of people do. So really, for the average user, like me, web-based email, especially Gmail’s superior interface, is perfectly fine.
Now if I could just get my email subscriptions to update from my old email address. 
July 19, 2007 9:05 am 
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