Thunderbird be gone and some thoughts on mail clients

For the first time in years, Mozilla Thunderbird is not installed on my computer. I kept it for a while to see if I'd switch back to it from Y! Mail. I didn't, so it was time to lay down the boom. The mail data was backed up to a USB stick, and the program uninstalled completely.

To be honest I'm surprised at how easily I was able to give up TB. Once I had everything moved into Y! Mail I had this profound sense of relief to the tune of, "YES! Now I don't have to be tethered to a specific computer just to get my frappin' mail."

I honestly believe that mail clients as they are right now are going the way of the dodo. People have been saying this for years but I guess I'm just a late bloomer.

The future of the mail client is only going to serve one function - backup medium. As far as actually using a client for anything outside of that, there's really no point and it serves as a liability more than anything else. The liability factor is in the respect that if all your mail is on a specific computer, and that computer's hard drive busts, the mail is gone. Sure, you could pull all the mail from a backup, but then you'd have to reinstall the client, import all the mail back in there, blah blah blah. That's just annoying.

As a backup test I'm going to pull a complete backup of my Y! Mail into Windows Live Mail via POP. A total of 14,409 emails. It's close to 2GB worth if not over that. Backing up a Y! Mail account is a bit of pain in the ass, but it needs to be done just to ensure I can actually do it. I'm confident however it can be done without issue.

And if it doesn't work, oh yes, I'll be sure to blog about it. 🙂