Hi there,

I am fan of Mozilla, and I use Firefox and Thunderbird at home on Linux, and portable with flash drive at work on windows, this Mozilla combo is versatile with add-ons and cross platform, I also use Firefox on my Android devices. Firefox is especially flexible with account settings synchronization, I don't even have to backup my settings when reinstall, but it is still a memory hog especially with add-ons, making it very sluggish sometimes, there are other choices of browsers like Chrome and Opera that work better and also support synchronization.

Thunderbird on the other hand does not support synchronization, and very sluggish too with add-ons such as Google Calendar that I used most, the worse thing is Thunderbird is no longer actively supported, bugs may not get fixed, I have yet to find a replacement for it. I don't want Gmail to take charge of everything, on the contrary I want the email client to handle my Gmail, just like what I am doing now wiith Thunderbird, any suggestion and comment ?

This is an issue with all Web-Mail interfaces, not just Gmail. Me too, I consider it far better to organize my mail-access and mail-storage myself than let anybody else give me a glimpse of what my mailbox may potentially look like, at the moment.

This said, you should take a look at cygwin. This creates a Unix/Linux-like environment on Windows and you can run a lot of Linux programs on Windows, which do normally not come as a downright Windows-port. Many programs can be installed directly to cygwin from the Internet. As regards Mail-clients and if my memory does not fail me, there was Claws as a graphical mail-client. My favorite MUA is Mutt, which runs in a terminal and is most certainly available, too.

But I have not touched anything Microsoft for ages and cygwin must have evolved into something even more fantastic than it already was “in my times”.

Also, I have successfully tested Pegasus Mail in a wine session. This had been my favorite MUA on Windows. Even on Linux it ran quite smoothly, although I deem it overloaded with functionality.., but so is Thunderbird.

Some random links, that I find around the topic:
Mutt on Cygwin: http://www.oocities.org/win32mutt/cygwin-ssmtp.html
Claws for Windows: http://www.claws-mail.org/win32/
Pegasus on Linux: https://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=284

Beware outdated web-sites. I believe that Mozilla has succeeded in brushing aside all cross-platform development of Mail-clients and that running software with cygwin and/or wine are your best alternatives now.