Square Galaxy

Thunderbird is an email software sibling to Firefox, the excellent web browser from the Mozilla foundation.  Today I found out that version 2.0 was released for Thunderbird.  Among the new features are:

• Message Tags (labels)
• The ability to “star” messages
• Gmail integration

This seemed like a great new feature set, especially the Gmail integration.  As I played with the new version though, I found that the Gmail integration was less than I fully desired.  I was hoping that the message tags and stars would be able to be applied to my Gmail box, and the changes actually reflected in Gmail.  However, I learned that the Gmail connection is simply a POP mail connection, which means changes on the local system are not reflected at all on the server.  So for now, using Thunderbird with Gmail allows you to star a message, but the star never gets posted back up onto the Gmail server.

Hopefully someday integration will be more integrated.  That level of integration, however, would require Google to publish an API for Gmail.

Related posts:

1. Did Google just change the world again?
2. Voicemail label in Gmail
3. Cleaning out the inbox