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Chromebook diaries: Need for a mail client


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I have recently made the shift to Chromebooks. I lie – I have recently acquired a Chromebook with the thought that I would use that when I can’t be bothered to use my ‘laptop’ setup. I have a reasonable setup, with a second monitor, a nice and keyboard mouse docked in, you know the drill. Also, my ageing laptop, while still efficient, sighs a lot (as in gets hot), and isn’t particularly good on the battery front. An hour or two you do still get, but that is hardly what you’d call portable computing these days. So, I realized to my surprise, that I was actually using the Chromebook as my main computer way more than I thought I would. Something that was to me just an upgrade from a tablet, an Android with a keyboard pretty much, ended up becoming more than that.

You see, all the buzz Google have tried to create around Chromebooks is true. They do boot up in a few seconds, under 10 mostly, give you more than 7 hours of battery life, and are really fast. Chrome loads faster on my sub 200 Chromebook than it does on my i7 Processor 16GB RAM laptop. It works, and it works so well. I do not like the ‘file explorer’, and it does have its limitations, but as a blogging tool, it is spot on!

Most limitations have work arounds I find. There is a way to get Skype to work on this, and you can use Google apps to do all kinds of things you would using Microsoft Office. There is one thing though, that I do miss. A good email client. Yeah, if you are running email that works through Gmail, then all is good, but since I have about 5 different emails, 2 of which use Google, and others don’t. Why so many emails? I live a varied life, with many different hats. Why not converge them to one? Would not like to mix it up.

There is the CloudMagic app, that is available through Chrome, which does this to some extent, but it is ever so slow, and after a few uses, I just gave up.

Which makes me wonder. With the millions of ‘apps’ now available through browsers, everything from designing circuits and CAD to your basic Office tools, why is there no web based Email client that can let you manage multiple email accounts? I know Outlook.com used to let you do that, but they stopped that years ago. Now you have to sign out and sign in to something else. The other alternative is to use Incognito windows to sign in to various accounts. So my question to all of you is, is there such a thing which lets you do that?

I am looking for an Outlook or Firefox based email client that lets me do all that online. If Tweetdeck can handle multiple Twitter accounts, why can’t something else?

 

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One thought on “Chromebook diaries: Need for a mail client

  1. As of December 2017, there still doesn’t appear to be a good solution from the Web Store. Best solution still seems to be installing Linux (via Crouton, dual booting Gallium OS, etc.) then use one of the many e-mail clients available (ones not vulnerable to Mailsploit). Even using Android Apps (either with the newer Chromebooks or via the RC Welder App for the older Chromebooks) doesn’t compare with Thunderbird or even OE Classic (oeclassic [dot] com). At least with Firefox, you could install the SimpleMail Add On. {sighs} The lack of a client other than GMail Offline (not eager to route even more data through them) is still a depressing sticking point & with G00gle’s increasing totalitarian behaviour, it’s becoming increasing more critical to migrate away from their cyber-environment.

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