That Gmail supports POP3 and IMAP may be old news for some of you. But it's new news to me. I might have heard of the original announcement of Gmail's POP3 and IMAP support along with other computer news items, but it scrolled off my mind pretty quickly.
I most recently rediscovered it a three days ago, when I was setting up my old IBM Thinkpad (you've seen it here 1643 days ago) as my wife's computer. Being able to play CDs, DVDs and online videos, and being able to use email and some websites were the only requirements.
So I removed the Grub bootloader (login with discuss/freely) and the Linux partition, rebuilt Windows XP Pro, applied all patches, installed iTunes, RealPlayer and Windows Media Player, Firefox. and Thunderbird. My plan is to setup the regular email with Thunderbird, and save a couple of bookmarks for Hotmail and Gmail.
When I opened the Thunderbird account setup wizard, it gave me four options:
email
feeds
Gmail
newsgroups
That "Gmail" option grabbed my attention. So I chose it, entered the username and password. At that point, I was informed that I had to turn on POP support in Gmail. When I went to Gmail to turn on POP support, I was informed that what I really want to do is to turn on IMAP. So I did that. And come back and configured a regualr IMAP account for Gmail.
That got me to thinking: can Hotmail be accessed from a regular email client? I vaguely remember that Outlook Express supported Hotmail. So I did a Live search, which lead me to this Microsoft page. It essentially said that I need to upgrade the Hotmail account into a Windows Live account, and that Windows Live Mail is what I want. I downloaded Windows Live Mail and setup the account there.
Just for simplicity, I also set up the other two email accounts in Windows Live Mail. So now my wife can access all three email accounts from the same Windows Live Mail client.
I don't know what she'll think about the new email client. But I've heard enough complaints in the past about both Gmail and Hotmail that I believe Windows Live Mail will provide a better experience than both Hotmail and Gmail's web interfaces.
If you've followed this post to this point, I might as well waste a couple more minutes of your time to address an assertion that I heard uttered by Web fanatics, for example:
Tim Bray: This notion, that the Web GUI is insufficiently interactive and we need something richer, is widely held among developers and almost never among actual users of computers, and it’s entirely wrong.
This seems completely backwards. If by "actual users of computers" he means the non-programmer users of computers, then my experience is completely opposite. They don't usually care whether an application is Ajax or RIA. But they can tell which one is better. At least in the email clients arena, the RIA is always better than their Ajax counterpart.
As far as I can tell, the only people who are touting the merits of Ajax Web UIs are web fanatic developers and vendors who has a big stake in the continued dominance of the inferior Web UI.
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