Good Gmail desktop mail client for Windows?

Question

Is there a desktop email client -- available for Microsoft Windows -- which is especially well suited for use with Gmail? Perhaps something similar to Sparrow for OS X?

About the feature set, I would be open to compromise, since I have this feeling that the ideal desktop Gmail client for Windows doesn't exist... Some ideas of what would be nice to have are:

• Support for multiple Gmail accounts.
• Mail cached locally, a desktop client should have a well working offline mode.
• Support for Gmails threaded conversations.
• Support for Gmails labels (tagging) system.
• Integrates with Gmails spam filtering (mark as spam, mark as genuine email).
• Integrates with Gmails contacts.
• Lightweight, fast to load, uncluttered user interface.

( Note, this question is related to other questions, such as this one or this one or this one. But I did search, and I could not find a clear answer / duplicate to my question. )

Answer 1

Good Gmail desktop mail client for Windows?

The best UI you're going to find is the gmail web UI itself. That's what you're intended to use. Gmail's tagging/labelling system seems to be outside of the imap/pop standards, so I think finding a third party application that correctly supports them, is probably an exercise in futility.

Support for multiple Gmail accounts You wanted multiple gmail accounts supported - a way of doing that is to enable "multiple sign-in". This feature lets you click on the email address (account) you're viewing in the upper corner, and select other accounts you're signed in to. Thus letting you switch between mutiple accounts. Here's instructions on how to enable this.

Mail cached locally, a desktop client should have a well working offline mode I believe this too is in fact supported from the web ui. Take a look at Gmail offline here.

Support for Gmails threaded conversations Check.

Support for Gmails labels (tagging) system Check.

Integrates with Gmails spam filtering (mark as spam, mark as genuine email) Check.

Integrates with Gmails contacts Check.

Lightweight, fast to load, uncluttered user interface I've found the gmail ui to be reasonably heavy. You may want to experiment with using it under different browsers. The main potential benefit is that different browsers can use different javascript engines. I believe the next Firefox release is meant to have a far more efficient javascript engine. I'd guess that Google Chrome is pretty darn efficient for gmail. In the worst case, you could opt to run gmail in HTML only view - that'd be light-weight.

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Edit - Thunderbird?

As an alternative, I suppose Mozilla Thunderbird looks like it may fit, IF you install certain addons.

For conversations, try this.

For contacts, try this.

Though, I think you'll still find the label support to be weird. I think you'll get label support at all, if and only if you set up gmail access over imap (and not pop).

Answer 2

Geemail looks like the only thing that comes close to what you are asking for:

http://www.sourcebits.com/geemail/

Answer 3

Gmail Offline is a Chrome application.

Answer 4

After some searching around, I have found what I believe currently comes closest to what I was looking for.

Postbox 2.5.3 is a crossplatform (Mac & Windows) mail client, with a simple user interface, and solid support for Gmail. While Postbox works very well together with Gmail, Gmail's somewhat nonstandard IMAP folder layout & tagging system still means there are some differences between web GMail and Postbox. Postbox describes them in detail here.

The runner ups, the mail clients I ended up not using but which came very close, were Mozilla Thunderbird 7 and Microsoft Outlook 2010. They're both far from being the simple, light mail client I was looking for, but they're very good IMAP mail clients.

Answer 5

you can try NINGAL Gmail Desktop: http://www.ningal.com