Bye Bye Outlook – Hello Mozilla Thunderbird

The other day I noticed the link on the Mozilla start up page for Mozilla Thunderbird email. What did I have to lose? Firefox has been such a improvement for my web browsing, Thunderbird would surely be just as good.

The download was free and painless. It gave me the option to pull all my existing information and email in from Outlook or I could start from scratch. All in all, the whole set up took less than 5 minutes.

So far I am pretty impressed. It is a powerful email program, but is not a Personal Information Manager (PIM) like Outlook. That’s fine with me – I didn’t use half of Outlook’s features anyhow. There is a calendar add-on if you really need it, too. Thunderbird has a good junk mail filter and will alert you if it feels a message is phishing or contains potentially harmful items.

I love its system that lets you label messages as Important, Work, Personal, To Do or Later. This is a huge positive feature as far as I am concerned. The address book is straight forward and you have the ability to indicate auto-fill features and automatically enter outgoing addresses into your address book.

It even won the ZDNet Australia’s Editors Choice Award.  If you are tired of Outlook’s ways, give Thunderbird a try. I did and there is no looking back!