For the past week or so I’ve been using a new email client. I’ve been a big fan of Thunderbird for a while, I like it’s simplistic style and it’s easy of use. I also like that it’s not made by Microsoft! The biggest draw back I’ve found with Thunderbird is it’s search routines. I find it to not always be reliable for looking for things that I know are in my inbox somewhere. I stumbled across Postbox and thought I would give it a try.
Postbox is based on the same code as Thunderbird and to be honest, from my experience it still feels a lot like using Thunderbird but with a lot of added features. It looks cleaner than Thunderbird, it still has a message list and a message preview but it breaks down separate mail boxes showing only the folders specific to the highlighted mail box.
Here are some of the added features you get with Postbox:
- Advanced Search – You don’t just get the search box at the top right to fill in, you can bring up a pop up menu where you can search specific fields in a message like sender email address or contact name.
- Conversation View – Messages with the same topic are grouped together, much like they are in gmail’s web interface, meaning you can see a whole conversation (both received and sent) in one view making it much easier to keep track of whats being said.
- Introspective Pane – When a message is clicked all images, links and addresses are shown on a pane (much like attachments are) to the side allowing you to easily see anything you might need.
- Email Tagging – Emails can be tagged to particular topics, even to multiple ones allowing you to quickly find all related emails. Kind of like filtering on the fly.
- Tabbed Browsing – Open up different folders in different windows then swtich between tabs just like you would in Firefox.
- To Do List – Hold you to do list in your inbox, mark emails as to do as well.
- List Attachments/Links/Images – With postbox you can list search through your folders and produce a list of all attachments, web links or images included in them. Can be quite useful if you know you received a certain file but cant remember the sender.
The main downside for me is that it doesn’t currently have a calendar and as it doesn’t support adds (like Thunderbird does) you can’t install the Lightening add on to get around this. It’s still in beta so there is the possiblity that this may be added yet.