Plenty of us use Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, but how many of you use Thunderbird, the company’s e-mail application? If you don’t, now would be a good time to give her a test drive since today Mozilla released version 2.0. Improvements include better, faster search, tagging and internal message alerts (kinda like Growl).
Mozilla is the victim of its own success. Its Firefox browser is king of the hill, but poor old Thunderbird has been comparatively ignored. I know I’ll take another look at it now since Apple Mail isn’t exactly fantastic.
Thunderbird [Mozilla via ZDNet]
I switched from Outlook to Thunderbird about 6 months ago and I will NEVER go back.
I love the fact that the email filters are much more flexible and can be based on a mailing list…. big plus…. when u get a new email address simply right click on it and add it to the list and the rule uses it…. no more manually adding to the rule each time!
Also inludes the RSS reader….. which is how I just learned about this CG story!
I have been using Thunderbird for some time now – since I ditched Pegasus. Its pretty decent. Still needs some work on becoming a full-fledged client like Outlook. Calgoo has a nice calendaring component, if only they would integrate it with Thunderbird.
For me, the big problem with Thunderbird is the inability to import my address book from a standard vCard file.
With all of the web based email services around, who needs an email client anymore? Sure, I use one at work — only because we are a Windows software shop that uses Outlook/Exchange, etc… But when it comes to my personal email, I prefer a web client. I have an IMAP email account, but prefer to use a web based client to access it. Maybe I’m different… I’d be curious to see a poll of the people who use web based email vs. client based.
I’m sure there are some nice benefits to using a program like Thunderbird, and I’ll probably give it a spin to find out for myself. . . but I’m with Shaun. Not only do I enjoy my Gmail web client, I like knowing that no matter what computer I’m using, my user experience is going to be the same. That’s a comfort level I’m not sure I want to give up.
There must be a poll like this out there somewhere.
I have a love hate relationship with TB. I won’t use a web mail client since I’m travelling and offline a lot. I like its relative security (doesn’t do dumb things with attachments) but it’s soo buggy and it feels like every data structure was done with a bad linked list implementation – get a few thousand pieces of email in the inbox and watch it crawl. If you partially download an attachment before a network disconnect happens, try getting it to ever download that attachment again. If they paid a little more attention to code quality and performance it would be a really nice client. That’s what made Firefox successful.
I’ve used Thunderbird for several years now. The new version starts up very fast and I’ve never experienced any problems I couldn’t fix with a brief search on the net. Even the beta versions of 2.0 worked fine.
I’ll continue using TB.
It’s just that Gmail is soooo good!
-Appleseed