Gmail introduced a new feature called Mail Fetcher, which lets you read mail from other accounts in Gmail. It's a great feature, and Gmail has already been declared perfect because of it, but let's not get too enthusiastic yet
This great new feature (currently available to only a small fraction of Gmail users) enables you to use only Gmail for all your e-mail purposes, which is great. Gmail, which is in my opinion already the best web-based e-mail client, just got a little better.
However, I don't think it's time to call it 'perfect' yet. It's a great service, but as an e-mail client it's far from the best. I use Ritlabs' The Bat, a sometimes quirky and moderately buggy e-mail client, but also the most powerful client out there.
While Gmail is good and simple to use, The Bat! has at least 50 features that Gmail doesn't. Instead of listing them all here, I'll just name a couple I really use:
- Threaded view. You can set your view to be threaded with sender's address being the thread anchor, which makes your e-mail infinitely more organized and less cluttered than in standard view. Since i receive a lot of email, this feature is invaluable to me.
- Different passwords for different accounts. A minor feature that I use in the following way - I have some simple password for my business accounts, which I share with some of my colleagues, so they can read it on my computer when I'm not in the office. On my private accounts, I have a different password.
- Fine tuning of your spam filter. Gmail's spam filter is nice, but you can't really fine tune it as you can in The Bat!
The list goes on. As I've said, Gmail is great, it offers a lot, and maybe in time it will render all desktop e-mail applications obsolete. But not yet.
2 Comments:
Which bugs in particualar do you hate in The Bat! if you mention that it is "moderately buggy"?
December 12, 2006 at 1:26:00 AM GMT+1
@maxim: well, I don't know how familiar you are with The Bat!, but it's widely known to have weird bugs. It's hard to say exactly what they are because it tends to act differently on each computer. Some of the problems I can remember were a corrupted database, and weird slowdowns.
However, it's working pretty well for me in the last 6 months, so I'll continue using it, as it is the most feature-packed e-mail client out there.
December 12, 2006 at 8:43:00 AM GMT+1
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