Congratulations to Mozilla Messaging for finally finishing Thunderbird 3! In honor of last week’s Thunderbird 3.0 release, I’d like to do a series of blog posts on my experience migrating from GMail to Thunderbird over the past couple months.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of things about GMail. Treating the conversation, instead of the individual message, as the basic object was a big step forward in e-mail interfaces. Good, fast search plus vast disk space changed the way I think about my email archives.
However, this October I ran into some problems with GMail. I had set myself up both to receive email sent to my mozilla.com address in my GMail inbox and also to be able to send from my mozilla.com address through the GMail interface. Although it had the minor drawback of mixing my work and private lives together in a single extremely busy inbox, that seemed like a fair price for the increased convenience.
In October, though, I realized that some of my coworkers hadn’t been getting emails from me. It took me a while to notice: I thought everyone was just too busy to respond to what I had written. But by asking a few people to search their inboxes for mail from me, I confirmed a hunch – most of the mail I had sent from my mozilla.com address through the GMail interface over a period of a couple of weeks had not been delivered. It hadn’t gone to their spam folders, either – it had just silently disappeared.
Everything had been working fine up until October, so what happened? I’m still not exactly sure. One theory is that my Mozilla mail was being sent through gmail.com, but the “from” address said “mozilla.com”. A “from” address that doesn’t match the sending server is a common sign of spam, so maybe a change in spam-filtering policy made our relay servers start throwing out my messages. On the other hand, maybe it had to do with me changing my Mozilla LDAP password, and not remembering it to update the password stored in my GMail settings for the external account.
Either way, it was the worst kind of software failure: the silent kind! Because GMail’s interface reported that the messages had been sent, I never stopped to think that maybe they hadn’t. It’s easy to forget that email was never designed to be a highly reliable protocol. Sometimes you get bounce messages back when something goes wrong, but it’s never guaranteed.
So I don’t particularly blame GMail for what happened. It would have been nice to get more notification, but the problem was really outside of their knowledge or control; I was expecting too much from a web application. It is in the nature of a web application that the user gives up a certain amount of control in exchange for convenience. Often a good trade. But for something as personal and essential as my email? My experience with the lost messages drove home the price of not having that control.
Besides, it was about time I started eating Mozilla’s own dogfood for my email.
I’ve been keeping a notes file on my transition to Thunderbird. In my next few posts I want to share with you some of its pros and cons, tips for using it effectively, things that are cool about its interface and things that could use improvement.
Not The User's Fault 
December 20, 2009 at 8:30 am
“I was expecting too much from a web application. It is in the nature of a web application that the user gives up a certain amount of control in exchange for convenience.”
What do you mean? How is this a failure of web applications?
December 20, 2009 at 10:45 am
It’ll be great to have you as a Thunderbird user, regardless of the state of your gmail usage! For that is the first step on the road to resurgent ubiquity integration 🙂
December 20, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Anders said pretty much what I was going to say already…
Not blaming gmail for what happened, as it is beyond their control makes sense. But then you go onto say it’s a failure due to it being a web application, which doesn’t make sense. The failure (if what you suspect is correct) is down to the way email (in particular SMTP) works.
You would have exactly the same problem if you used a desktop client like Thunderbird along with some ISP server.
But, answering my own point, I guess the issue is that Thunderbird will talk to many different IMAP and SMTP servers. Gmail (and other web apps) will generally only talk to their own servers.
December 20, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Do you use the Mozilla SMTP server in Gmail with SMTP auth? If yes, Gmail will set the ‘Sender’ field to ‘authname@smtpserver’, what e.g. Outlook doesn’t really like. Really lame.
December 21, 2009 at 1:33 am
About sending email with a “From” address that doesn’t correspond to the sender’s SMTP server: I’ve been doing it regularly without problems, but in the other direction, as follows:
My ISP blocks me from sending to port 25 (“ordinary” SMTP) or 587 (SMTP over SSL) except to its own servers, so I’ve been sending mail with a From address @gmail.com to the SMTP servers relay.belgacom.net and relay.skynet.be (the only ones I can access). AFAICT, it works perfectly.
Of course, what I have not tried is to send @belgacom.net or @skynet.be mail from Gmail’s outgoing mail servers (which I can only access through Gmail’s webmail interface).
Personally I have gone “from Skynet to Gmail” (what concerns incoming mail servers) because Gmail has one advantage: I can retrieve “false positives” from their “Spam” folder instead of losing them forever. However I have also gone “from Gmail to SeaMonkey Mail” (which, as you probably know, is very similar to Thunderbird), by having Gmail let me fetch my mail from its POP servers, because I find SeaMonkey’s (or Thunderbird’s) mail-news interface much more “user-friendly” (or at least, much more to my taste) than any kind of webmail (and, Michael, part of the reason is indeed that I can have mail from all my POP accounts in a single place and reply to them through the same interface, even changing the From-line if I want to reply “from @gmail.com” to something that came in “to @skynet.be”; but in addition to that, plaintext mail [my preferred kind] and HTML web pages are IMHO not suited for a common way of handling them).
December 21, 2009 at 10:12 am
GMail has two ways of sending out mail from other accounts: through GMail servers or through your own domain’s SMTP servers. Which were you using?
And to solve the one inbox problem you could use the Multiple inbox feature in GMail Labs.
January 1, 2010 at 11:38 am
Hello, just a note: GMail is correctly spelled as Gmail. 🙂 Thank you.
January 6, 2010 at 9:50 pm
Interesting timing. After 5 years or so, I just recently decided I’d like to start managing my email outside of the cloud. My decision is mainly due to the aesthetic experience… I’m tired of corporate branding and ads. It would also be nice to get the old drag-and-drop attachments functionality back. So, I’m interested in your experience and look forward to hearing your updates.
January 31, 2010 at 11:19 am
Did you ever find out what the problem was?
And if not how can you know that Gmail is to blame? Just curious…
On a side note we are releasing detailed step by step guides for how to set up Thunderbird to synchronize email with Gmail very soon. You will be able to find the guides on http://www.Easy-Email.net.
This enables you to manage all your email addresses from one email client. Each email address can have its own inbox, outbox and other folders.
Since Thunderbird is synchronizing the email with Gmail it means you can work with Thunderbird on your own computer(s) and when you are away from your own computer(s) you can use Gmail… and regardless of which email client you use you will still have access to ALL your sent email, received email and email organized in folders. Once it is set up there is nothing more for you to do to make it work.
It also means you can automatically synchronize your email on all your own computers… your home computer, your netbook and your laptop… without lifting a finger…
You can get more info and find the guides on http://www.Easy-Email.net.
March 27, 2010 at 5:00 pm
Hi there,
I was wondering how you got on now we’re a few months down the track, do you miss Gmail? I still think using both, properly synchronized, gives the ultimate email management solution. Webmail has so many advantages that email clients don’t and vice versa. I did a video that shows the advantages of this if you’d like to check it out.
November 10, 2011 at 9:02 am
It was not working for me too. The only thing that i had to do was to put 209.85.143.16 ip because imap.google.com could not be resolved. Same situation with SMTP. Try to ping this address from behind proxy server. If you get response than it’s something else.