New Email Program: Thunderbird
Posted in Personal Stuff by John E. Pannell on May 19th, 2007 at 12:29 am 
No, Occoneechee lodge has not started distributing email software! 
Acting upon the advice of one of my brothers, I stopped using Microsoft Outlook earlier this week and started using Mozilla’s email program, Thunderbird. I am one of those folks that likes to gripe about Microsoft even though I still use a lot of their products. So, I was very glad to find an high quality, easy to use, alternative to Outlook and Outlook Express.
It has already served me well, with one feature that Outlook does not have: the ability to search my inbox folders. I’m told Gmail users have this ability to already but I didn’t.
Recently I sold a bunch of items on eBay. I had two people who paid by check that did not include anything with their payment to tell me what they won, an email address, or their eBay id, so I was unable to send them their merchandise. By process of elimination I was able to figure out one of these “problems”, but I still had one orphaned payment left. Using Thunderbird as my email program, I was able to search all the folders in my inbox looking for his name. Luckily, he previously wrote me and I was then able to know what to send him… Problem solved. This one little feature alone is enough to keep my using Thunderbird.
It also has better security and spam control features than Outlook. That was also very helpful to me as I get about 300 spam messages daily now. I also find the mail routing rules easier to set up and use than in Outlook. Being open source software, it is also highly cusomizable for those who are technically skilled. It is also free.
Overall, I’m very impressed. If you’re looking for an alternative to MS Outlook and Outlook Express, it’s worth giving Thunderbird a try.
Popularity: 6% [?]
I’m sorry, but I still think the Thunderbird icon looks like an envelope with a bad toupee.
Yes, but I still like it better than Outlook. It’s the Donald Trump of email programs, perhaps?
I’d rather have folks writing a good email program rather than designing a good icon.
Are you still using IE, by chance? If so, take a look at Firefox.
Yes, still use IE as my primary browser.
I had tried an early version of Firefox and didn’t like how it handled the “target” property of the anchor tag. That was very annoying to me and slowed down some of the grunt things I had to do on the site.