Notes on tech

While returning back from China to India, I realized that I needed offline access to my Gmail emails. My Singapore airline flights didnt have any Connexion access from Boeing. Besides, even if they had the service, I am guessing, it would be a big ripoff. So better to be offline and get some work done. Gmail supports POP access, though you will have to enable it from within Gmail*.

So to get offline access to my Gmail emails, I installed Thunderbird from Mozilla. Its from the same folks that brought to you Firefox. Wikipedia has a nice chart comparing various email clients. For me it was either Eudora or Thunderbird. On a hunch, I went with Thunderbird. This arrangement doesnt need a local spam checker, as these emails are already processed by Gmail before they get downloaded by Thunderbird.

Thunderbird supports multiple identities. Thats a big relief for me. I receive emails from atleast three different mail addresses on my gmail account. Now I can manage them from within Thunderbird. Though I still need to figure out how to get my mails from different accounts organized in different folders.

Once you install Thunderbird, you can find out the number of unread mails directly from within Firefox. There are a couple of mail related menu items under Tools.

Now that I am comfortable getting the maximum mileage out of Firefox by using extensions, maybe I could try out some Thunderbird extensions as well. Thats the true power of open source and having a large developer community.


* Gmail even provides good enough instructions to configure various mail clients for POP access.