OSS

Downloading 16478 emails, almost 2.4 Gb is not for the faint heart. I aways wanted to have a local backup of my Gmail account, but the idea of transferring mother-load of data always made me think otherwise. Besides, there was another road blocker, or rather I should say the Google "best search app" syndrome, that says that no desktop client comes close to the capability of Gmail websearch that can dig your emails and present a compelling alternative. Let's see if we have a contender...

Playing around with Thunderbird 3-beta4(T3B4), it surely doesn't feel like I am living in 2004 anymore. Funny, we haven't seen any evolution in email client interfaces in past 5 years. And for tech industry, surely 5 years is fairly long time. To say the least, I am quite impressed by the T3B4 with its new cool interface, addon plugins just like firefox, thread view combined in one message pane (View all the threads as one single email) and much more.

The feature that single handedly trumps everything else including the aging google interface, is the new search interface. T3B4 client indexes all the local folders and provides a very fast search capability, even better than Canonical Evolution. The Results page shows a timeline graph generated from all the messages returned from the search query. It also identifies top senders in the results and allows you to modify the results by adding/deleting selected senders/recipients. Hovering your mouse on the sender, you can see graph overlay showing what percentage of all the messages are sent by that particular user. Sweet !. Even the folders where the mails are picked up are shown as tags (for selection/de-selection). T3B4 ran perfectly fine with fresh 2.4 Gb of data and results were as fast as blink of an eye.

To make things even more interesting, Mozilla just released Raindrop, which boasts even more radical ideas on data representation. Too excited about new Messaging tools :-).