*Thunderbird* is a desktop *email client*, an alternative to Microsoft's
Outlook, from the developers of *Firefox*. Thunderbird is Mozilla's award
winning and free solution to manage your mail more efficiently. And there are
many advantages of switching to it too. Unlike Mail for example, it can
handle virtual identities and create on-the-fly addresses and it's widely
regarded as having one of the best spam filters out there. The fact that like
Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird can be beefed up with all manner of extensions
makes it an extremely competitive mail client. It's also now much faster and
more stable than before due to the new Gecko 5 engine. *Getting going*
*Setting up* Mozilla Thunderbird is painless. You can quickly import your
mail and contacts from your Outlook or Mail account and set up POP3, IMAP or
SMTP accounts in a flash. To stay well organized, Mozilla Thunderbird offers
filters to deliver your mail into *separate folders* and *inboxes*. And of
course, there's a built-in spell checker to make sure that your mails are
professionally crafted. What makes Mozilla Thunderbird slightly more unusual
is the fact that it comes with an integrated RSS reader. Nowadays, this is a
little outdated because many people use a separate application - or even
Firefox itself - to follow RSS feeds but it may be useful if you only want to
mail and follow RSS feeds at the same time when composing mails. *Searching
your mail* The search tool in Thunderbird is excellent and searches happen in
real time as you type. Search results are displayed in a separate tab. Tabs
in general are a very big part of Thunderbird and like Firefox, you can have
multiple messages open in separate tabs. This is a fantastic feature of
Thunderbird although does tempt you to have too many mails open at once.
Archiving is also another handy feature for those that don't want to delete
messages but want to clear space in their inbox. So what about security? You
might think an open-source mail client would inherently be less secure than a
paid one but Thunderbird is surprisingly secure with a fairly bulletproof
spam filter. The reason being is that Thunderbird is regularly updated and
crafted by volunteers who's main interest is making a better product rather
than profiting from an end-product. Security updates are regular but small so
as not to slow-down Thunderbird. *Exchange support* One of the biggest
selling points of Mozilla Thunderbird is that it offers Microsoft Exchange
support, meaning it will appeal to Office users who previously discounted it.
On the downside, the app is lacking some finesse in certain areas.
Thunderbird still doesn't have conversation style email views like in Gmail
(although an extension to do this can be downloaded separately) and there
aren't many options for managing attachments and photos. There's also no
calendar but again, this can be downloaded separately in the form of
"Lightning". *Overall, Thunderbird is an excellent free alternative to
Microsoft Outlook.* <<Download *Thunderbird 7.0.1* in Softonic
