Email Client for Vista 32-bit?

Hey guys,

I've been wanting to download a program lately for consolidating all my email accounts (Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and MSN/Hotmail) in one client. I've been doing some searching and the most popular ones so far are Mozilla Thunderbird and Zimbra. However, I am still open to more suggestions. Also, please suggest if it would be less burdensome to just access my accounts one-by-one on a cloud. Given the many complications of syncing contacts, emails, etc.; I understand many users who would have switched to email clients are quite frustrated.

Anyways, here are my top requirements for a good email client:

1. Freeware/Open Source that gets updated quite frequently for bug fixes and improvements.

2. Able to sync seamlessly with Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and MSN/Hotmail. This includes syncing contacts, emails, email folders, etc. I understand that now all clients work well with Yahoo and most require you to pay a subscription fee through Yahoo Plus!

3. Able to seamlessly open and download all types of attachments available on the cloud (pictures, documents, .zip files, etc.).

4. Showing the progress bar of uploading and downloading attachments (similar to how Gmail functions).

5. Able to sync emails with cloud accounts (Yahoo, Gmail, MSN/Hotmail) without deleting the copies on the cloud servers. I've heard that the Apple email client has problems with this function as a friend had synced his Yahoo account with the Apple email client only to find out that every time it synced, the copy of the email on the Yahoo cloud gets deleted and stores in the Apple email client.

6. User-friendly, customizable, and with useful add-ons.

Appreciate any comments and suggestions. Thanks guys!

 

I think the contacts might be an issue - but have a close look at Windows Live Mail.
Outlook is the other obvious choice (but neither free nor open source)

-> You can definitely leave copies on the server with both (although I think you need to manually set it up that way)

 

i've consolidated all my email accounts into gmail (gmail uses pop3 to access hotmail in my case, and i can send as davepermen at hotmail.com straight from gmail again). no clue about yahoo.

no clue about contacts

personally, for desktop clients, i'd use imap. so there's no local copy of the mail (but an offline copy still is there), all in sync, so no way to lose the online mail.

yeah, windows live mail and outlook are options that work both fine. or stay online only, as i do with gmail (with syncs to my phone).

tons of options.

but i have no clue about contacts. i just merged them once, they don't change much for me anyways.

 

Which makes you dependent on the commercial Stasi, aka google who have shown themselves to be an incompetent bunch of idiots:
Gmail Disaster: Reports Of Mass Email Deletions
Google blames software update for lost Gmail data | Digital Media - CNET News

-> And putting all the data into google's hands makes it much easier to analyze you.


Edit:
The advantage of different email clients is being independent from all of them and not affected if one is run by a bunch of incompetents.

 

your statement is offtopic and non-related to the op (not to say a complete lie you create out of your crazy brain).

he asked for options. i gave him options. options that are good enough for me to be my choice.

you should really stop with your anti-google-crap.

about "an incompetent bunch of idiots". guess what, everyone makes errors sometimes.

 

-> Not really, because your suggestion of bundling everything could be a data security issue.

And anti google -> google's business is to exploit people's private information and use that for advertisement as well as selling it on. I will continue to be anti-google sadly with some things they are the only viable choice.
-> If google had a core business as Microsoft it wouldn't be different, but they haven't.
Same with Facebook, disqus -> all the same.

And "everybody makes errors" -> yes, but if you are an email provider as large as google you should more than double check if it causes any issues.
-> Considering that people have hinged their business on google that becomes pretty important.
And the fact that they needed ages to restore some emails doesn't help either -> if they had that issue, then 48 hours at most maybe, better 24 hours later they would have restored access, hmm, that's an error "that can happen".

 

I recently got rid out outlook 07 and netzero as clients, I am using zoho mail. It is free for non-commercial use Email Hosting - Hosted Email for Businesses - Zoho Mail

Transfer of outlook mail, contacts, and calendar was very easy. I really like the interface.
It may not be as feature laden as you are looking for but it is relatively new and the company seems to be responsive to problems. I suggest looking at their forums B4 you take the leap
Zoho Forums - Customer Support and Feedback Forums for the Zoho Suite

Hope this helps,J