Well, yeah, Thunderbird has to go get my mail. Gmail has to go get my mail, too-what do you think its loading screen is for? And both Twitter and its numerous clients have to fetch my tweets. Surprise: data in the cloud has to be downloaded.
Email clients send your email immediately; it only sits in the outbox if it failed. Thunderbird has had tags for ages, Thunderbird 3 makes them more visible, and I'd be very surprised if other popular email clients didn't have tag support.
And email clients have the same advantage that Twitter clients do: they can integrate with your desktop. I get a notification of new email whether I'm looking at my browser or not, whether my browser is even running or not.
I suppose it could also be something to do with the way the protocol works. On the web, my e-mail list doesn't take long to download and therefor I can happily leave my Inbox messy (currently 575 messages, 473 unread). If I used POP, it would want to download everything to my local box, if I wanted it or not. And if I used IMAP it would still want to download 575 headers just to display my inbox in a big list rathered than paged. Thusly the client doesn't suite my model. For notification and quick preview, I can use Trillian connecting to Google Talk to give me a quick look at my inbox status and notification of new mails.
My inbox has 8000 emails, going back four years. It's yet to be a problem.
POP is a joke. IMAP doesn't need to be paged exactly because it isn't limited like the browser. Read your most recent email and let the client do everything else in the background. Then you have it around for reading and searching even if Internet access goes out or the server is down, which has saved my ass several times. It works pretty much like git.
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The things I can accomplish with a powerful text editor are much more interesting than what I can do with any kind of web browser.
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Email clients send your email immediately; it only sits in the outbox if it failed. Thunderbird has had tags for ages, Thunderbird 3 makes them more visible, and I'd be very surprised if other popular email clients didn't have tag support.
And email clients have the same advantage that Twitter clients do: they can integrate with your desktop. I get a notification of new email whether I'm looking at my browser or not, whether my browser is even running or not.
Reply
If I used POP, it would want to download everything to my local box, if I wanted it or not. And if I used IMAP it would still want to download 575 headers just to display my inbox in a big list rathered than paged. Thusly the client doesn't suite my model. For notification and quick preview, I can use Trillian connecting to Google Talk to give me a quick look at my inbox status and notification of new mails.
Reply
POP is a joke. IMAP doesn't need to be paged exactly because it isn't limited like the browser. Read your most recent email and let the client do everything else in the background. Then you have it around for reading and searching even if Internet access goes out or the server is down, which has saved my ass several times. It works pretty much like git.
Reply
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