Thursday, December 9th, 2004, 6:58 am
Outlook Versus Thunderbird
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As some of you may know, M¥cro$o£t store mail in DBX files. This may seem like a benign format, but it can cause great trouble if you intend to keep a maintainable mail archive (one of my pet peeves). I decided to try the highly recommended Thunderbird which is expected to replace the Outlook family just as Firefox begins to nudge Internet Explorer out of the game. I was amazed by the ease of this migration. I now have:
- A mail archive that is open format.
- Spellchecker that does not require Office.
- A whole new set of features which I have never conceived (and neither have M¥cro$o£t).
The bottom line is that if you do not download Thunderbird now, you’ll be missing out…
December 9th, 2004 at 3:27 pm
I do not doubt that Thuderbird has good features, but if people really knew how to use Outlook to the full extent of all the options available, I think they would be perfectly happy and reluctant to switch.
December 9th, 2004 at 6:19 pm
They sure made it easy to import from MS to be up and running immediately
just the fact that it is not MS makes me favor it
Is it less susceptible to targeted attacks as Netscape, Eudora or a Mac?
I’m going to give it a try …I like the drop down menus for sever accounts in the From field…and the auto-complete
The calendar reminder is definitely missed (for me)
thanks for the tip on this
now lets try the spell checker… Eye sea sum Miss steaks
Update…Actually, I had a problem with the smtp setting.
December 10th, 2004 at 1:15 am
Harvey, which features do you think Outlook has that Thunderbird might lack?
December 10th, 2004 at 1:18 am
Scott, are you using all the correct SMTP settings? Are you enabling SSL? Do you authenticate with the server at all? Mozilla has sophisticated mail sending settings that should support and cover all protocols.
December 10th, 2004 at 5:28 pm
Well, I have not explored Thunderbird, but for me organizing, views, colorizing incoming messages and easy to use are all important. Now, if you can tell me that Thunderbird has an effective Junk Mail screener, I would be an instant convert.
December 10th, 2004 at 5:43 pm
Junk mail filtering is the selling point of Thunderbird. I get a very mere amount of junk mail, so this was not at all a reason for my conversion.