Earlier today Michael Novak wrote about a possible Excel killer on the horizon from Apple. Right now, I’m writing about an Outlook killer. In all seriousness, none of these applications are going to take the place of anything in Microsoft Office. Office is too engrained into too many businesses to be overtaken anytime in the next few years. But competition is always a good thing because it pushes everyone to make a better product.
Recently, Mozilla (the great folks who brought us Firefox) released the newest Alpha version of Thunderbird. Thunderbrid is a great mail application that while not quite ready to take over office buildings is perfect for home users and a lot of small businesses.
I have been using Thunderbird for about half a year now and I love it. I was so glad to get rid of Outlook. One of my favorite things about Thunderbird is the fact that you can store multipe outgoing smtp servers in one profile and then set every email address to use the “default” smtp profile to send messages. As I used to travel a lot I would hate having to go into my Outlook preferences to change my smtp server for every email address that I wanted to use. In Thunderbird all I have to do is store the smtp servers that I normally use and then just go into my preferences and switch the default outgoing mail server to the one that I need. This makes things so much easier on the road. On top of that, I haven’t found anything that Thunderbird can’t do that Outlook can (things that I would use anyways).
Thunderbird, just like Firefox, has a ton of great extensions available and you can easily import all of your settings and emails from Outlook so you won’t skip a beat. If you’re looking for a new email client, Thunderbird is definitely worth a shot. Unless you want to be a guinea pig though you might want to stick with one of the earlier, more stable versions.
Thunderbird is a great application! I use it on Fedora because it comes as the standard mail application. Since then have used it in place of outlook on the pc! Great article!