Thanks for the response and the detailed information about your system. It’s a little complex for my tastes (I’m a Google Apps girl these days), but I’ll bet it will be of great use to others looking for workable solutions. Thank you for offering the info!

1. First you have to decide on what Mail server to be used (and I preferred a cloud server that I can access anywhere): Choice is between MS Exchange Server Vs Gmail. MS Exchange Server is very expensisve and cannot be installed for personal use. MS has a less expensive cloud version MS Exchange Online. I preferred Gmail as this is free and much easy to set-up compared to Exchange Online. (Later I realized Gmail syncs easier with Thunderbird, and not sure Thunderbird can be used as an Exchange client at all?).

2. Next you have to choose a good email client to do your daily work. You can opt for Gmail, but I prefer the convenience of an email client to that of a web interface as in Gmail. The choice to be made is between Outlook and Thunderbird. Outlook is a very heay program, its installation size itself is 1.5 GB compared to about 8 MB for Thunderbird! Naturally the progam is relatively sluggish for normal use. So for daily regular use Thunderbird is advisable. Thunderbird is faster than Outlook and syncs very well with Gmail on IMAP. On the other hand there may be tasks involving writing lengthy reports which require numerous and detailed formating, indexing, smart graphics which I believe is better accomplished on Outlook.

So I now have for the same account: Thunderbird as my IMAP client for regular daily use, a POP3 Outlook client always continuously running, downloading my email, and which I use for more complicated projects and Gmail as my Mail Server available wherever I move.