Thunderbird vs Evolution

Shifting back recently to a stand-alone mail client from web-mail client, it was back to the tricky decision about which mail client to use.

I chose [:http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/|thunderbird].

Although I have used [:http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/|Evolution] extensively before (and even contributed to the project), I feel that thunderbird is more lighter solution than Evo. Evolution has improved a lot these days, but the complexity on most features hasn't ceased to exist.

When thunder struck thunderbird

Thunderbird on the other hand coughed and limped when I downloaded thousands of mails of last two years from all that was dumped on the 2+ GB gmail account. There was this crazy bug, as well:

(Note that the Inbox shows 10481 despite no mail in it)

But thunderbird still is a good option, for it doesn't seem to hurt the RAM or CPU as much as Evolution does on my laptop that is low on resources.

Signatures

One feature that I missed very much on Gmail and now missing partly on thunderbird is the ability to set different Signatures for each outgoing mail separately. Thunderbird offers something called "Manage identities" dialog that associates a signature with each account - but no set of signatures to choose from on the Compose dialog box.

Evolution has this feature well etched. But gmail has always had provision for just one signature.

Other delicacies that would go missing

Thunderbird now seems to have got some bindings for gaim (Instant messaging links via address book) as well. But calendar would be the important feature that would go missing when opted for thunderbird.

The threaded display, too, is a little crazy on Thunderbird. Search functionality obviously isn't as good as searching on gmail (guess it is the same with other email clients as well). But simplicity is what lures you to go for thunderbird. :)