Let’s face it folks, Thunderbird is KING. Myself, my dad, all the people at my office, and a friend of a friend (who happens to own, of all things, a strip club in Boston) all use Thunderbird for their email. It is hands-down the best email client you can get (for free).
Thunderbird is, at its heart, a mail reader – plain and simple. And it does that one thing VERY well. It is the only free email reader I know of with Bayesian spam (junk mail) filtering built in (Eudora has similar filtering, but you have to buy Eudora to get the spam filtering). It also is a really, really good RSS reader, which I like because I have a few feeds I read here at work, and having them in my email program (which is open all day long anyway) is very handy.
Other great things about Thunderbird include the fact that you don’t have to worry about all the security exploits that affect email clients such as Outlook and Outlook Express. Thunderbird will also block images that are included in an email, if the images come from a 3rd party server (website). This is good because such images can often be pornographic or carry viruses. Of course, a single click restores the images, in case the email is from someone you trust.
One area that Thunderbird fails in is filters – you can set up some nice filters in Thunderbird, as you could with Mozilla Mail “back in the day.” However, the actions that you can have Thunderbird take when filtering mail are basically limited to moving the mail to a different folder, marking it with a particular status (read, unread, etc) or just deleting it. As a former user of Eudora, I was painfully aware of the much more powerful filters available in Eudora – you could have the email redirected, forwarded, or even have Eudora reply to the email with a template email you had set up. Some of these features are no doubt coming to Thunderbird soon, however… the nice thing about Open Source Software like this is that when people want some feature – it tends to get put in! Also, extensions in Thunderbird allow people to add odd features to the program – and that’s a “Good Thing.”
All in all, you can’t go wrong with Thunderbird. The only thing it can’t do is integrate with a Microsoft Exchange server – but businesses that have an Exchange server probably have a legitimate need for it’s capabilities, and the capabilities of Outlook (although I would recommend to anyone that even having to use an Open Source version of Exchange server and two or three different programs to emulate all of the features of Outlook – i.e. calendaring, notes, shared contacts, scheduling, internal email – is better than using Outlook; at least IMHO it is).
Still, if you’re a home user, you’re not going to be worried about Exchange server – so do yourself a favor and get Thunderbird now… and “reclaim your inbox.”
