Zack Rippy

Many people are familiar with Mozilla’s excellent Firefox web browser. Mozilla also offers a somewhat lesser-known application as well - their Thunderbird mail client. The latest version (1.5) has been available for some time now. I have had it installed and have been playing around with it for several weeks so I thought I would offer a quick review.

First of all, in the spirit of openness, I need to say that I am a Microsoft Outlook user. I know it is bloated and convoluted, but I have used it for many years. I use it for all my email, calendar and contact management needs. Outlook is my personal information manager. Like an old pair of comfortable tennis shoes that should probably be replaced, I have kept Outlook with me since my earliest emailing days. Want to send an email? Outlook. Want to keep up with my calendar? Outlook. Need an email or mailing address? Outlook. Regardless of all the complaining about Outlook (and the fact that it is a Microsoft product makes it an immediate target), I have never had a problem. Ever. I know it inside and out and can maneuver it with ease. Having said all that, it would take a lot to impress me to the point that I would consider switching. Just being a marginally better product would not be enough. OK…enough of that - onto the actual review.

The installation was quick and painless. It took no time at all to download the compact 6MB file. Upon first launching it, Thunderbird prompted me to setup an email account. I supplied the requisite server names, username and password and I was good to go. I literally had it configured in 30 seconds. Anyone who had their account information in front of them could have done the same.

The interface should look familiar to anyone familiar with Outlook Express or many of the other email clients out there. It features a hierarchial folder structure on the left with the email list at the top left pane and a preview pane at the bottom left. The interface is intiutive and it took no time at all to become familiar with it. By default, it blocks images in both the preview and email windows, giving you the option to download images from remote servers or not.

Writing an email is plain and simple, with fields for To: CC: and BCC: along with the normal font and formatting options. It even has a “smilies” dropdown with several choices…for when words just aren’t enough to get your point accross.

The built-in address book is nice, though rather minimalist. Nothing too fancy or impressive there. It would definitely get the job done though.

Thunderbird has a built-in RSS reader. It is decent, but not overly impressive. Individual articles in a feed are displayed like emails, with the content displayed in the preview pane. It gets the job done, but I’ll stick with the Sage plugin for Firefox, thank you very much.

Thunderbird offers excellent message filters and routing options. It lets you route messages based on sender, recipient, priority, date, status, size or combinations of them all. The rules seemed to work just as well as my Outlook 2003 rules and were rock solid. I am very impressed with this part of Thunderbird. I actually think the rules/filters are more configurable in Thunderbird than in Outlook.

You also get basic junk mail capabilities. They seemed to catch pretty much the same percentage of true spam as Outlook did. Of course, you can setup black and white lists of senders, as well flag junk based on custom words and phrases.

Thunderbird does have a few major weaknesses for me though. First of all, Mozilla offers no method by which one could access a Microsoft Exchange server. This will be a key feature if Thunderbird is ever to catch on in enterprise environments. Like it or not, Exchange is ingrained within many corporate messaging infrastructures, and Exchange support will be critical for Thunderbird to reach corporate users.

Secondly, there is no native calendar support. There are third party plugins under development and they show great promise, but the folks at Mozilla really need to build this into the mail client itself. Many people like me have grown accustomed to using our email client as our complete email/calendar/PIM solution and Thunderbird needs these features to compete against Outlook.

Finally, Thunderbird needs a more mature Address Book/Contact ability. The current iteration is fine for basic personal addresses, but it needs better grouping and tagging capability to enable greater organization of contacts.

After several weeks of playing with Thunderbird, I come away from it very impressed overall. It is a small, tight application that is much faster than either Outlook or Outlook Express. In fact, for readers using Outlook Express, I whole-heartedly recommend switching to Thunderbird. It will require little to no adjustment and will offer generally good performance with EXCELLENT filtering capability, competent contact management and adequate junk mail handling. As a replacement for Outlook Express, Thunderbird is a no-brainer.

For me, I will be sticking with Outlook for now. My main reason is the advanced contact features, the built-in calendar and my overall comfort level with Outlook. I will be watching the development of Thunderbird very closely though. As soon as they implement a few of these required (for me) features, I will happily switch to this excellent, free, open-source alternative.

Mozilla Thunderbird is Highly Recommended.

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Note: Review updated/corrected 03/07/2006. I mistakenly stated that Thunderbird does not offer IMAP support, and it most certainly does. - Thanks David!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 5th, 2006 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Reviews, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.