Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0

~Introduction~

Mozilla Thunderbird has nothing to do with the Thunderbirds or the Ford Thunderbird, but is actually an email client, like Outlook!

What is an email client? Well they let you read and send emails and some have extra features like address books and vCards and RSS Aggregators.

~Emailing Ability~

Thunderbird allows you to send and receive emails through POP3, IMAP 4 and the SMTP ...
...is partly due to the Mozilla Gecko's speed and are easily searchable. The gecko is the open-source Netscape layout engine. Netscape is a rather old (and nearly obsolete) Time Warner owned web browser and web portal.

You also have filters, so certain emails go to certain folders and unlike Outlook Express built-in spam control.

~RSS~

Thunderbird reads RSS (Really Simple Syndication). This lets you read ... more

~Introduction~

Mozilla Thunderbird has nothing to do with the Thunderbirds or the Ford Thunderbird, but is actually an email client, like Outlook!

What is an email client? Well they let you read and send emails and some have extra features like address books and vCards and RSS Aggregators.

~Emailing Ability~

Thunderbird allows you to send and receive emails through POP3, IMAP 4 and the SMTP for sending. These are all different methods of sending and receiving emails, with different email clients supporting different ones.

Like Outlook Express on Windows XP Service Pack 2 HTML is partly stripped from emails to remove security vulnerabilities it allows. You can send HTML emails nonetheless. HTML allows things like italics, underlines, bold, links, inline images...

You can automatically attach a signature, but this has to be edited OUTSIDE Thunderbird as either a TXT file in Notepad or a HTML file in a HTML editor. This is quite hard!

You can also attach a vCard, which is a digital business card, to your emails by default.

All emails are fast to load, which is partly due to the Mozilla Gecko's speed and are easily searchable. The gecko is the open-source Netscape layout engine. Netscape is a rather old (and nearly obsolete) Time Warner owned web browser and web portal.

You also have filters, so certain emails go to certain folders and unlike Outlook Express built-in spam control.

~RSS~

Thunderbird reads RSS (Really Simple Syndication). This lets you read articles from your favourite news website or blogs without even opening a web browser. The idea is you can have hundreds of different sites you like to read, but don't like the hassle of having to open each one just to find none have being updated! RSS solves this, Thunderbird at start up checks if the site has being updated, and if it has it will display the news. Firefox has a similar feature that lets you read RSS from the bookmark menu. 16 people read my blog (joeanderson.co.uk/blog) through RSS (at time of writing)

Thunderbird supports RSS, and podcasting will be added in version 1.1 (I know, I have the test version). Podcasting lets you listen to podcasts, which are recorded radio shows anyone can make. They are for your MP3 player.

~Address Book~

Mozilla Thunderbird has a very simple address book; even George W Bush could use it, and has most features Outlook Express has.

It lets you add names, numbers, emails, addresses, 'other information' amongst other things in a nice light form. The address book has a little search bar at the top for searching for names or emails, and advanced search if you need to search through over parameters.

Everyone you send an email to goes in, which is annoying as even Ciao Surveys go in your address book for that one support email.

It can also get maps via MapQuest.

~Importing~

You can import emails, settings and contacts from various clients and files such as TXT, CSV, Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora and Netscape Communicator.

The capabilities aren't as good as Outlook 2003 which has support for programs such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange.

~Lack of Calendar~

Thunderbird lacks an integrated calendar, which really lets itself down. Mozilla have a separate calendar program called Sunbird which integrates almost perfectly into Thunderbird but doesn't work in Thunderbird 1.1 alpha (a build of Thunderbird still in testing).

~Looks and Skins~

Mozilla Thunderbird looks very 'light'. Light means spaced out and uncluttered, but has a pre-XP style design. (So no pretty colours).

This doesn't matter as hundreds of themes are available from https://addons.mozilla.org . This can make Mozilla Thunderbird as pretty or ugly as you want!

~Why is it free?~

The folks at Mozilla believe in something we call open-source. Open source really took off when Netscape released the Netscape gecko donkeys ago.

Open-source developers are volunteers, anyone can edit it. Yes anyone. That's how it stays alive. It also needs people to donate.

Generally some good chats take place on irc://irc.mozilla.org/#thunderbird, they also offer free technical support for Thunderbird.

~Okay, so will it run on my computer?~

Answer: Probably. Of course you need a reasonable amount of RAM, hard disk space and operating system. You need Windows 98 (or above), Linux kernel 2.2.14 (or higher) or Mac OS X 10.1.x (or higher). You also need 64MB RAM and about 250 MHz of processing power on most operating systems. So if your computer was made in the last 6 years you'll probably be fine.

If you don't have the necessary operating system consider switching to a Linux distro, there's one for most platforms.

~Conclusion~

Sorry for writing such a short op. I do hope though that you now see why Thunderbird is so good. If you don't understand anything I've said please comment and I'll tell you, lol!

Thunderbird is a great program, and there's no reason why you shouldn't get it, it's free after all! It's had 9 million downloads according to SpreadFirefox.com. Visit www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird. 

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