Email aggregators

[Brah]

Anyone use an aggregator of email accounts like Thunderbird, Email Tray, and the like?

I started to a while back, but lost some emails in the process, so am wary. But the convenience of grouping email Inboxes is an efficiency I am looking to restart.

[securedude69]

Thunderbird would be a good start. its free, reliable and not as difficult to port out all your mails into another PC or notebook when the time comes for you to migrate it out or move all your mails into a larger HDD... it might be a little more work if you wanna do say porting of your mails from Windows to Mac or vice versa, but its not impossible, just very tedious. Have experienced that one time and never want to do that again keke...

[Brah]

Thanks for that, I knew someone had to have familiarity with this kind of app.

I tried both apps I listed, about a year ago, and grouped some accounts into each app, separated by purpose. For example, personal accounts went to Thunderbird, business-oriented accounts to EmailTray. And there was a third app I was trying as well.

One of these accounts was a Yahoo one which had email dating back to my very first emails, probably early 90s. Something happened, and I lost all email before a certain date in the late 90s. I think what I lost was in the Inbox and Sent folders, the other folders appear ok.

As before porting the accounts to these apps, I hadn't checked those emails, I have no idea how many were lost, how far back, etc.

In hindsight, and for anyone considering this, it would be better to move or copy all of your Inbox emails to a new subfolder before adding your accounts to one of these apps. Who knows, the apps may have limits to how many emails they can handle, or dates, or some other thing.

Ironically, one of the two reasons I wanted to use these apps, besides the convenience of many accounts:one interface, was to have a backup of my old emails, which both of these apps can do for Yahoo mail, Gmail, etc.

[x9200]

I misunderstood your first post - I thought you meant something server base.

I use Thunderbird and Mail on Mac and Evolution and Clawmail under Linux. My approach is that these are only the mail clients and I don't store the mail in local folders (i.e. on my laptop) but rather then this I have one dedicated storage space. To do this I run my own mail server but it can be any, also commercial one allowing IMAP access and with sufficient storage space. Using the clients I only read the emails always leaving them on the original servers and later, from time to time (typically if the mailboxes are full) I back them up to the storage server. This solves both portability and accessibility issues as IMAP is a standard protocol understood by any modern client.

Thunderbird is in general fine but under Mac I did not manage to convince it to read from servers running MS-Exchange protocol (i.e. Outlook based servers). Mail can do it without any problems.

[Strong Eagle]

I guess I am missing something. I use Outlook. I have multiple feeds... from Google mail, my own ISP, my company ISP... all IMAP, which means available on my Android (K9 mail) as well.

[nakatago]

I'm guessing you want e-mail clients rather than e-mail aggregrators. A little bit of a pedantic point there as people seemed initially confused.

It's been a while since I used them but I preferred Thunderbird over Outlook just for the ability to have search folders* back then. Although Outlook can have similar functionality through VB macros, Thunderbird has the additional benefit of being free and cross platform. Outlook, on the other hand, works well in an office where a whole lot of Microsoft services may be used (and integrated).

*Much better than putting mail in folders since an email can categorically belong to multiple folders. This makes searching for a particular email much later on so much easier.

[Brah]

You are right, I should have said clients, and it's not pedantic.

Though I don't know that all clients allow for multiple accounts, and for some reason I seem to remember that earlier versions of Outlook did not, but I could be wrong.

So has anyone lost email when aligning them to clients? And do you use the client to back up your email?

[nakatago]

You are right, I should have said clients, and it's not pedantic.

Though I don't know that all clients allow for multiple accounts, and for some reason I seem to remember that earlier versions of Outlook did not, but I could be wrong.

So has anyone lost email when aligning them to clients? And do you use the client to back up your email?

You may be thinking of Outlook Express.

Just be aware if your web mail is POP or IMAP. For the benefit of our other viewers reading this thread, POP downloads your mail and usually removes it from the server. There may be settings to prevent this but I don't remember. IMAP synchs.

http://mail2web.com/blog/2010/02/pop-imap-difference/

[Brah]

Just be aware if your web mail is POP or IMAP. For the benefit of our other viewers reading this thread, POP downloads your mail and usually removes it from the server. There may be settings to prevent this but I don't remember. IMAP synchs.

Hmmm...I had downloaded or synced, not sure, email from Yahoo which is POP, and the emails are still in Yahoo. And to your point, I did loose some emails, but they were not downloaded.

Yahoo even tried to restore my account, but couldn't get those emails back.

Like x9200, I planned to keep the mail in Yahoo, and use the mail client to aggregate feeds and to enable a backup of emails, with the intention to keep all emails but to pare down what's become an unwieldy amount of email accounts.

[x9200]

Yahoo is POP I think but whether it deletes the e-mails from the server it depends on the client used. By default most of the clients will delete but they should not do it before a local copy is made. Technically they do not need to delete anything.