When Multiple E-Mail Accounts Make Sense
This week, Mozilla’s cross-platform e-mail client Thunderbird has been getting a lot of attention because Mozilla has announced a new subsidiary focused on it. Thunderbird is a good e-mail client, but I actually like to use several e-mail clients for various purposes–in addition to my primary use of Outlook and Gmail. On a USB key I carry around with me, I have a number of small footprint, free e-mail clients, and I’ll round up some good portable ones you can carry in this post.
QM – The Quick Mailer is a good e-mail client to have on a USB key because of the extremely small footprint it has—only 16K. You can also add QM to Windows Explorer’s Send To menu for a very fast way to e-mail files from any machine in an organized way. That’s a handy little application that I wouldn’t turn to a bulkier e-mail client for.
JBMail is another small footprint e-mail client that is great for a USB drive. At 159K it takes little space and loads instantly. It has POP3 and SMTP support, and you don’t need to install it to use it on the run. You can just load the application right from a pocket USB drive.
For Mac users, GyazMail is a free, small footprint alternative to e-mail engines such as Entourage. If you frequently work on a mobile basis, it can get you out of a jam, and it has solid security features built in. GyzMail also integrates with lots of features and the scripting in Mac OS X, so you can easily use address books with it and more.
Of course, I use Mozilla’s Thunderbird on a regular basis as well. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a solid application and if you use multiple platforms it will be flexible enough for you.
One final benefit of using multiple e-mail clients is that you can greatly reduce the amount of spam you receive in your primary e-mail accounts by using other clients when it makes sense. For example, I try out a lot of web applications that I’m not necessarily going to use later. When I sign up for them, I often like to use one of my non-primary e-mail addresses just to make sure that the addresses I care about are not on every mass e-mail list out there.
Do you use multiple e-mail clients? Do you know of any good portable clients?
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I use Outlook for work email, Outlook Express for personal email, and Thunderbird for my non-primary accounts. This way, I don’t have to worry about accidentally sending something odd or inappropriate to my business contacts, and vice versa.
Perhaps the title of the post should be “When Multiple E-Mail Clients Make Sense”. Multiple accounts often make sense, I have more than a dozen active email accounts. If you do a post on that, I’ll be sure to chime in on reasons and benefits.
It seems that GyazMail is not free anymore. Any sugestions on an alternative?
I use my own build of Portable Thunderbird in german. Own loader via NSIS.
http://stadt-bremerhaven.de/2007/11/13/portable-thunderbird-2009-deutsch/
Any portable email client which handle both Hotmail and Yahoo out there?
I use desktop based Thunderbird to manage 10 email accounts very easily – all via IMAP. When I need a particular one on the road I can use Portable Firefox on my thumb drive to access the web view of the accounts, and I believe there are portable Thunderbird versions as well.
I use Outlook at work, Thunderbird for my personal hosted account, and Gmail for my two alternate personal accounts. I have the hosted and Gmail accounts on my iPhone, and my BlackJack holds the leash to my work email.
I like being able to turn off the Blackjack on Sundays.