I had a quick look at their site but I'm still not sure what they change from vanilla ubuntu.
I get that it is built on Gnome technologies but is it like gnome2/mate or like gnome3 or something completely different?
After a fresh install I usually start with removing the apps I don't use -- games, accessibility tools, print drivers, cd burner, document indexer, default email client etc. etc. etc. So I guess this flavor would be the opposite of what I want...
Prior to that I used gmail. When I used thunderbird it often seemed to spend all of it's time indexing. It has some nice plugins though.