Call me old school, but I like having a thick client for my email. Thunderbird is a great email client, I prefer it to a web browser. I also like being able to work while offline.
I also like being independent of my ISP for email services: should I ever change ISP I’d like to keep my email address. And gmail is a reliable (enough) service with tons of storage at the right cost (free). My ISP rejects my attempt to send email while traveling on a different network, but gmail doesn’t.
So how to put these things together? IMAP.
IMAP is a protocol for leaving your mail messages on the server, but still access those messages from your client as if they were downloaded locally. It’s a much richer protocol than POP3. And it can handle folders. Make a change on the client and it is immediately stored on the server. So I can use Thunderbird but everything is handled on the gmail servers.
I’m not sure how popular the IMAP service is on gmail, but I think it is pretty cool. My own ISP offers only a web interface and POP3.
Here’s how to enable it: Login to the gmail web interface. Select “Settings” then “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” and click “Enable IMAP”. It is disabled by default, but so easy to turn on. Don’t forget to click the “Save Changes” button. Now you need to configure Thunderbird to connect to the gmail servers for both receiving new mail (IMAP server) and sending outgoing mail (SMTP server). Here are the instructions for Thunderbird, or just click on the “Configuration Instructions” link in the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab. Make sure that in Thunderbird’s “Security Settings” for the IMAP server that you select “SSL” so traffic flows encrypted on port 993. And in the “Security and Authentication” settings for the SMTP server make sure that you select “Use name and password” and “TLS”. This will enable all your Thunderbird traffic to be secure for when you are in the hotel or conference center or coffee shop, both incoming and outgoing mail.
But what if I want to access my email from multiple computers? The nature of configuring multiple clients to hit the same IMAP account is that a change made via one client immediately appears on all the other clients. So IMAP is the perfect way to do this. As an added benefit, I can still use the gmail web interface and see the same inbox and folders: I just got another client for free.
Are address books handled via IMAP? No. But there is a Thunderbird plugin, AddressBooks Synchronizer, to handle that. It can sync your Thunderbird address books across multiple Thunderbird instances using your IMAP account. This is how I keep my Thunderbird address book synch’d across all my clients. It doesn’t make my Thunderbird address book available in the gmail web interface, but someone is working on a Thunderbird plugin to do that too.
Maybe someday I’ll give up my old ways and use a pure browser-based email client. But in the meantime this is how I do it.