Mozilla Thunderbird 2

That said, there aren't as many features in Mozilla Thunderbird 2 as in the full edition of Microsoft Outlook. For instance, we couldn't find a way to attach pictures to contacts. Nor could we preview Office documents within e-mails. While we were happy to see our Outlook contacts imported in their entirety, we disliked that Thunderbird opened a separate window to display them.

Also, we wanted to use Thunderbird on a single computer to read e-mail from various sources as well as RSS feeds. Initial setup, which let us make only one of those choices, didn't make it easy to determine how to do that. Unfortunately, we found it clumsy to set up a signature line (done by setting up a message template) and an automated vacation e-mail reply.

Rather than being managed within a closed corporate ecosystem, many passionate Mozilla developers update Thunderbird. This community has created hundreds of add-ons. Although Thunderbird lacks a calendar and to-do list tool, you can add those separately through Mozilla's Lightning and ReminderFox. That's wonderful news for those willing to search, but a potential hassle for those who'd like everything preinstalled from the start.

Thunderbird renders HTML e-mails via the Firefox browser, which is good. Many users of Microsoft Outlook, on the other hand, complain that it uses a stale version of HTML that fails to breaks the full formatting of some messages.

Service and support
Thunderbird provides online support only, which is reasonable for a free product. Mozilla's Help pages include step-by-step tutorials with well-illustrated screenshots, as well as FAQs and keyboard shortcuts. However, we wish we could have searched directly within Thunderbird's interface for topics, such as setting up automated vacation messages.

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  2 out of 2 people found this review helpful

  "greatest email client ever"

  by skrilled on May 30, 2008

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  "Very Good."

  by adscram14 on November 8, 2008

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Where to buy Mozilla Thunderbird 2

Download for Windows.
Download for Mac.