For example, an employer decided to try out Salesforce.com. A lot of what they offer is very impressive. However, some of the coolest features were how you could track your email communications and generate sales leters, etc. BUT, it required you to use Salesforce to do your email, and none of the sales people were willing to give up Outlook. So in the end, it did not matter how cool the other features were—the lack of seamless integration with a popular mail tool prevented us from using it. (I’ve actually learned since that there are ways to make Salesforce and Outlook work together…but that’s another story…)

As has been pointed out, we need our contacts available to us when
1. Creating email
2. Creating form letters in our wordprocessing programs
3. Scheduling meetings and appointments in our calendars
4. In any program where you can “invite” people to share or collaborate.
5. On our mobile phones!
6. etc.!

If you go 100% with one vendor you can get close to this. For example, if you do everything with Microsoft Office using Outlook for calendars, contacts, and email, Word for wordprocessing, etc. Or, the full suite of Apple apps on the mac. I use an iPhone, and it syncs with Outlook and of course the Apple equivalents (I’m not familiar with them.)

BUT, like the author of this article, I’m a huge GMail fan. (Regarding the negative post about GMail—I think most people have that initial reaction because GMail breaks the barrier on some of the time-honored traditional ways of managing email….but in my opinion, once you embrace them, you think “why hasn’t email always been like this?!”) The big downside for me in using traditional desktop applications is that I’m either tied to my specific computer where my apps are installed or worse—tied to the company office so I can access the Exchange Server. There are myriad half-baked solutions to make these services “mobile”, but they have a lot of pitfalls in my experience. Web apps NATURALLY work anywhere from any computer as long as you have an Internet connection. (The internet connection requirement is a downside for some people.)

With latest innovations such as Adobe Air and Google Gears I think the barrier between online and offline apps will continue to blur.

Most contact programs do provide an export and import feature that can usually be imported into other contact programs. Some file tweaking may be required. For example, you can export your Outlook contacts to a CSV file to import into your Google Contacts. But this process is not automatic or seamless by any means—it’s the technical mumbo-jumbo that COMPUTERS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING FOR US.

On the whole Yahoo provides much more than Gmail. If you are a Google/Gmail addict, you have my deepest sympathy, for you will regret it soon, I fear.

http://www.etelos.com/store/store.espx?store=1396

A quick answer to one of your minor points – I just have any outgoing mails moved to the Inbox so I see all the mail from an entire thread. Go to Tools>Account Settings>Copies&Folders and check “Place a copy in:” then select “Other” and point that to your Inbox. Voila! Threads everything and doesn’t dupe them anywhere else.

BTW, TB is up to 1.5.0.9 now (several security fixes since 1.5.0.4 AFAIK), so you might want to update unless you’ll have a known problem you’re aware of. (You can have it check for updates and notify you without doing anything else – Tools>Options>Advanced, then Update tab.)

Hope this helped!
Chris

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/mail.html
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/ical.html
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/icalserver.html
http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/calendarserver

I’m using Thunderbird 1.5.0.4, and I can’t find conversation “tracking.” Do you mean the threading that most mail readers do? It threads messages, but it doesn’t show your sent messages in those threads (at least I can’t figure out how to make it do that). And it does show when you’ve replied to or forwarded a message, but I can’t figure out how to easily pull up the sent message.

Viewing the Google Calendar is one thing, being able to track your contacts, conversations with contacts, notes on contacts, call logs for contacts, meetings with contacts, etc. is another.

Tbird 2.0 Beta does tagging and convo threading, and the smart folders could be pretty handy for someone who isn’t as lazy as I am. It’s a little buggy still, but works well enough for my day-to-day use. The major problem with Tbird on OS X is that it won’t use Address Book, opting for its own internal system. This, in a word, sucks balls. It does, however, kick the shit out of Mail.app as an IMAP client. It does not, however, integrate well with any Calendaring/Task tracking apps (Sunbird and related stuff seem not to be considered serious projects by Mozilla, judging by the # of devs and speed of development. This is, IMHO, fucking dumb).

Mail.app has some real problems, in my experience, as an IMAP client, but once you get it working it normally doesn’t mess up too much. It integrates well with Address Book, and I guess kinda okay with iCal. Of more interest are a couple plugins for Mail.app: MailTags and MailActOn, the kind of crap hipster mac dorks who want to Get Things Done use:

http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html
http://www.indev.ca/MT2Beta.html

This dude talks about his Mail.app workflow, which seems pretty decent:

http://ee.koruproductions.com/mail_app_gtd_perfection/

My only real worries about buying whole-hog into web apps are:
1) Needing an internet connection to use them. There’s no GMail offline mode.
2) You have to do everything in a web browser, which carries with it technological limitations and problems like your web browser crashing in the middle of making some crappy “mashup” in Yahoo Pipes (which happens a lot when you use OmniWeb, like me).