Apple Mail vs Gmail vs Thunderbird

You could use gmail with either apple mail or thunderbird. Assuming you have a gmail account, you could set it up as an IMAP account in either the mail.app or thunderbird client and be able to use either on your mac or gmail over the web when not in front of your mac.

Pro of doing that is that you can access your email account in Apple mail or Thunderbird even if the net is down or you do not have internet access and still work/write/edit until you get to an internet access with your laptop.

As for the pro of apple mail vs thunderbird. It really subjective, even though one can compare features of both clients. you will basically have users that like either for different reasons.

hope this helps.

ps: an IMAP account allows you to make changes in apple mail or thunderbird on your computer, such changes would be reflected the next time you access gmail over the web, or vice versa

I've tried both thunderbird and apple mail and they're pretty comparable. The main pro of apple mail is OS integration (address book, iLife). As for setting up an imap account for gmail, I tried it (with apple mail) in Leopard and I couldn't get it to work. I don't know if that's a problem with mail or gmail.

Actually, I take that back - gmail & imap works fine now. That's probably the best solution because it leaves all the messages on the server - in principle, you could run apple mail and thunderbird at the same time and still check your mail using webmail, until you decide which you like the most.