For over 10 years, I’ve embraced an email client..

During that timeframe, the elder VanBergen fought and conquered these demonic beasts with poise, confidence, and heavy optimism.  From the taming of Outlook express 5, to the lashing of Eudora 6.0, across the lands of Novell’s GroupWise, through the sea of Outook Professional, and finally up the hill of the Thunderbird…  Many an email clients have been fought, hacked and re-configured to do my worst biddings.

These days of yore – of olde tymes – of clients and email – are no more.

I have been using Google’s Gmail since sometime in 2004.  However, I’ve almost always used a client to download the messages via POP3.  I can’t really say why… I guess old habits die hard.  Even in the first part of this year I was using thunderbird to pull down my gmail, as well as my RSS feeds.  As Google continues to improve their products and expand their capabilities, I see more of a benefit to going “ClientLess”.  Oddly enough, it was discussions over this weekend with a couple friends (flo, vanlandw) that really got me thinking about this switch.

I now have an iGoogle home page with front page gadgets giving me access to my email, my rss feeds, and all kinds of extra content like Netflix releases, weather, calendaring, and even a pac-man game.  Now, I’ve only been using this setup for about a day now – but so far there are no downsides to absorbing electronic content in this fashion vs. a client.

Google continues to amaze me with their products, and I continue to drink the kool aid.