What happened to my email client?

Okay - it’s now official. My email client is definately not my email client. In fact I’m not even sure who’s email client it is. I know email does arrive there sometimes, but that’s not what I spend my time doing. There is no real dedication to reading and writing and/or sorting email. I think my email client is now more an aggregation tool than an email client. In fact, by counting the amount of emails I actually write in my email client the whole setup is more like an “incoming-information” utility.

Everyday I’ll open up Thunderbird and everyday I’ll quickly flick down my list of RSS feeds. Occasionally I’ll scroll allll the way to the bottom to check for any incoming mail, but not very often. In fact, chances are that if I am in fact composing a message to someone I’m probably doing it in Gmail - there is something comforting about knowing that where ever you are on the internet you can always access your Gmail. Especially compared to Thunderbird which constantly reminds me that I can in fact NOT open you until I’m at least in the house.

But even now I find that something else is fighting for attention, for my news-gathering addiction. Bloglines. Why did this spanner get thrown in the works? Well, similar to the reasons for me slowly starting to use Gmail for most of my to-and-fro dialogues online, I can’t always be in Thunderbird to check my feeds. Especially whilst at work. But as I’m sure you must be aware trying to maintain two separate feed-lists is no easy task.

I read some of the news in Thunderbird in the morning and then proceed to arrive at work and continue to read them from Bloglines, only Bloglines shows me all the entries that I have in fact already read. So while Bloglines is great, and it’s a nice online aggregation utility - it is by far no where near as good at Feeding as Gmail is at Emailing.

I hope someone out there hears my plea. Either somehow make Gmail aggregate news, or someone design an online Feed aggregator that’s as powerful and effective as Gmail. I know there are probably quite a few of these online applications out there - but I’m yet to find one that really tickles my fancy.

Posted by Christian 3 April 2005

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