What is the Best Windows Email Client for Gmail?

roxysmile

roxysmile

Tough Luck :P
Disciple
I use 3 Gmail account ( Personal , Work and Gapps catch all for junk/subscription)

Whats the best software to manage all these account . The software must keep the emails for offline viewing (preferably text only versions like Opera) and must provide fast email search .

I love the new Gmail feature that divides my mails into different categories saving me the pain of going through and deleting newsletters etc. , any software with this feature ?

I have tried Outlook 2013 , Windows live , Postbox , Thunderbird , Inky , Emailtray and a few more but none of these provide the smoothness i need to manage my mails . Outlook , live , Thunderbird take ages to download the archived emails . Inky is still very slow . EmailTray works nicely and has unique priority feature but it has a broken search .

I was using Opera until now , has unified inbox , low bandwidth mode for emails . But these days it keeps crashing every few minutes and startup takes 1-2 minutes to load the mail database . Guess my 40k emails is too much for it to handle now .
 
To speed up things, did you try using a) only POP, b) only IMAP and c) "download header" only option with your clients?
I use IMAP for access-anywhere accounts and POP for (downloading and then) backing up emails. If you use only one PC to access emails then POP is the faster option.
 
Yeah i only use one PC to access email . POP only didnt work when i used it with postbox ( modified thunderbird ) as it only downloaded ~150 random emails and not the recent ones . As for IMAP i dont think it has Download Header only option(from what i understand about this protocol) . Also Header only wont download the email body which i need offline .

No other email client uses Text only email body download ? Opera has it ... how come none of the leading email client dont have a low bandwidth mode for people who only need the text content of the emails ?
 
Header only mode helps in 'manually' filtering out junk before you download heavy or all emails for the day. At this moment, I can't confirm if it's only available for POP setup. I've forgotten my networking basics.

Your recent mails are not getting downloaded using POP because it's probably not enabled for your older emails. Check the POP settings in your gmail account... there would be some date, post which all the emails are considered for POP use.

Since your account is huge,
a) you need to use a client for archiving/downloading emails to your PC for later use and
b) a separate browser based option to browse the latest emails.

Using only client will slow the things down for you. Here's what I did to overcome my problem. There are better ways to handle this but I had a slow internet connection back then:

1) Downloaded all the emails using POP over several nights. Put some important emails back to the server and enabled IMAP. This helped me in retrieving old important emails from any internet enabled device. My gmail account was set for POP from the very beginning; so I could download everything.

2) I use mobile/WAP version of the email sites - which are primarily text based and faster. For the non-gmail accounts that don't have mobile sites, I set my "browser agent" to mobile/iPhone. I get lesser to no ads that way, while maintaining the desktop look.

3) Now, that my email accounts are somewhat manageable, I either delete the email after reading off the mobile sites or archive them on my PC using IMAP enabled client. I keep IMAP enabled so that I could check emails from devices other than my PC.

4) You can use some kind of desktop notifier to let you know of new emails, in case you don't wish to keep running the client 24x7.
 
In gmail my POP is enabled from 2009 and Postbox downloaded messages from 2009 till 2013 but not all emails . Another problem with POP is that it isnt offering folders . I have multiple filters setup in my gmail account to auto archive or trash emails according to the keywords .

Outlook 2013 doesnt seem to have a Header only mode for POP . As of now EmailTray has been excellent in all but one area , Indexing . When i search for anything it only shows the recent 3 months of Emails that i received(inbox or archive) and rest i get Send messages from my account for last 1 year or so . Even my inbox is only setup to show only 3 months or less duration . And there is no option to change this .
 
roxysmile said:
Yeah i only use one PC to access email . POP only didnt work when i used it with postbox ( modified thunderbird ) as it only downloaded ~150 random emails and not the recent ones . As for IMAP i dont think it has Download Header only option(from what i understand about this protocol) . Also Header only wont download the email body which i need offline .

No other email client uses Text only email body download ? Opera has it ... how come none of the leading email client dont have a low bandwidth mode for people who only need the text content of the emails ?
Click to expand...

With Thunderbird you can set it to download messages of only less than 25kb.
It'll download all your messages, but won't download any images etc...just the text, until you ask it to download the rest of the message.
 
I've used several email clients and each one has its own limitations. I use outlook as I found very few drawbacks with it.

After downloading all of your emails prior to 2013, divide them into PST files and keep the size of each PST file under 2GB. Once you have lightened your gmail inbox (you've got around 40K emails), it'll be easier to use your client for daily usage.

I did all this last year with Outlook 2010 and I guess things wouldn't have changed much:

1) In order to download emails according to their labels (folders), enable IMAP sync for each label through outlook. Check out the context menu options for your Gmail "inbox" from inside outlook. There must be an option through which you can select specific folders/labels for "sync". Select a label to download all the emails corresponding to it. They'll land up in inbox. Create a new folder based on your label and move all recently downloaded emails. Do it for rest of the labels.

2) Now that everything is downloaded to specific folders on your PC, you have 3 options: a) delete everything from gmail and let outlook handle your gmail account from now onwards b) keep a few emails on gmail.com so that you can access them from other PCs c) keep everything on gmail.com and keep outlook in sync with gmail account.

for a) set your gmail to POP access so that everything is automatically downloaded from gmail inbox and subsequently gets deleted from gmail.com. You can set these options from inside outlook. Just remember to create outlook filters to mimic gmail's labeling system. You can get several 3rd party outlook plugins for managing spam and auto-filter just like gmail's.

for b) Temporarily set your gmail account to IMAP and copy those important emails to gmail. You can do it by setting up data files in outlook.

for c) Just set IMAP from gmail.com settings and ensure that sync is setup from outlook as well (context menu for gmail inbox in outlook). IMAP will be slower for everyday use, so use it along with some 3rd party email notifier. So, that you can read the usual emails and open up outlook only when you need to reply or to sync.

I don't have outlook setup on my current machine otherwise I would've attached some screenshots to make things clear. I mentioned the steps at high level, assuming you are well versed with outlook. BTW, I have emails from 1997 till present day properly synced up with outlook!
 
I will try that . But thunderbird seems so old these days ... has no priority + date based sorting . or auto sorting like gmail's new feature .Also sorting mass newsletters is so tough in thunderbird ... have to delete email with same subject line individually ( since they are not considered as thread ) .
I was kinda hoping for a new email client with features comparable to gmail web interface or better .
 
@gauravH The problem is outlook 2013 doesnt have header only mode and total size of my 3 account is around 7-8 gb which will take days to sync if fully downloaded . POP doesnt work for outlook or thunderbird as it downloads 157 random mails only( i only tested with my main account ) .
as for your 2nd point , i would be choosing third option as keeping all the emails locally and deleting everything from server is a bad situation in case of hdd crash .

I have thought of deleting old emails from the server but doing it one at a time will take too much time so dropped the idea . Any solution to this ? so that i can use gmail or similar websites to clean up my emails ? i googled this and got Mailstorm , lets see what it does .
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Yes, there could be utilities available exactly to handle your situation but I chose outlook as I wanted my office account to be in sync with my PC at home. My office uses MS Exchange.

Yes, it's going to take several days to get your huge account in sync with an email client. I did it over couple of nights. I found it easier to download everything using outlook and then sort/delete unnecessary emails using outlook's built in search feature. Once I brought the offline account to manageable level, I enabled IMAP and asked outlook to sync emails on my PC with gmail.com.

I guess you want to fix your gmail account first and then download/sync with an email client. Whereas, what I am suggesting is to download everything onto to your local system, fix it and then maintain it afterwards with an email client.
 
Back
Top