Evolution or Thunderbird or ...

Despite the rise of facebook as a dominant force for communication on the internet, I still rely a lot on email. Some people like web-based services such as gmail and hotmail because you don't have to bother with finicky details like POP, IMAP and SMTP accounts. But I like having my email in a separate application because for one thing it's quicker to access and you don't have to log into yet another service on your web browser to access it.

In linux (as in Windows for that matter) there's a wealth of applications available. I used to use claws-mail because it was fast, but when I switched to Ubuntu a few years back I decided to try evolution which is the default client in many linux distros. It has the advantage of having calendar clients built in and ties to a number of panel notifications for new email messages, appointments etc.

But I've been really irritated lately by how slow it is. It takes several seconds to open a new window to compose email, the same to switch to the calendar view. And with all of my contacts and calendars now stored on Google accounts to facilitate syncing with my Android phone, maybe it's time for a change.

I've been trying an old favourite Mozilla Thunderbird. Compared to evolution it's really fast and its screen lay out is quite compact. There's as much configurability as evolution and a plug in that allows for a tab with the google calendar page there at a click and much more responsive than evolution. Junk filtering seems to be as good as evolution and other filtering works quite well also.

So at the moment I'm quite happy with thunderbird. I'm sure I will run into limitations and problems, but it's great to have the opportunity to try out different applications. ...