Email Clients: Again.. With improved success.
It’s been about 8 months since I last took a stroll through email clients, trying to find one that worked in my specific setup, and I’ve decided to try again.
First off, let me recap my situation:
- I have 2 main email addresses, one normal GMail account and another one for VizWorld.com, hosted on “Google Apps for my Domain”
- All email to the VizWorld.com address is forwarded to the normal GMail Account, so I only have 1 place to check
- I need to be able to send & reply to email as either address (set the ‘From’ field)
- Don’t need to check the VizWorld.com account for email, since it’s all forwarded.
Last time I tried this, I wound up creating 2 “accounts” in my email programs, but this caused a lot of confusion as email to my VizWorld account fired off double-notifications of new mail, one for the VizWorld account and one for the forwarded copy in my regular account. Try as I might I couldn’t seem to get it to use IMAP and not check for new mail. Plus, if I opened an email in my regular account that was forwarded and tried to reply to it, It used my regular GMail address and not the VizWorld one.
Well, this week I upgraded to the new FireFox3.6 and found that my chosen solution (GoogleMail web app with Google Gears for offline access) doesn’t work any longer. I decided to see what had changed in the last 8 months and went and downloaded PostBox again, now at version 1.1.
I initially struggled with the same problems as before, until I decided to start playing with some previously unnoticed options. I found a feature in PostBox (and I presume in Thunderbird as well) called ‘Identities’. Go to your Account Settings and you’ll see that little nondescript “Manage Identities” button. Click that and you can create multiple “Identities”. An Identity seems to be all of the “Send Mail” settings (your Name, email address, and most importantly the SMTP server to use). I created two identities (already had the GMail one by default, so I created one for my VizWorld account), and voila it all works.
Now I have a single email account in PostBox, but when I reply to email it intelligently chooses the right identity to use. If it’s wrong, then I simply select the correct one from a drop-down at the top of the message.
With this little piece of knowledge, I’ve begun using PostBox as my primary email client. I’m on their 30-day trial right now, so I’ve got a month to decide if I’m going to keep it or switch to something else.
