If you read my most recent previous article, you know that I switched from using the Mozilla browser to using its lighter, faster, little brother Mozilla Firebird. Well, Mozilla Mail also has lighter, and faster sibling called Mozilla Thunderbird. I’m currently using Mozilla Thunderbird to manage all six email accounts.
If you pay attention to version numbers of software, you may have noticed that at this writing, Mozilla Thunderbird is at version .3 and Mozilla Firebird is at version .7. Neither one has reached the magic 1.0 version number, but from what I have seen so far, both are very stable and work better than many programs that have had a long history of version releases.
The following are the major reasons to consider using Mozilla Thunderbird as your email client:
- Spam is Canned: Mozilla Thunderbird uses Bayesian analysis to filter out spam. The filters actually learn what should be considered as spam based on what you manually tag as junk. After a few days of manually tagging spam, Mozilla Thunderbird will be accurately tagging most of it for you. The junk email rules are easy to configure. I suggest having all your junk email sent to the junk email folder where you can do a quick check on it and delete it all at once. In my experience, I have yet to see a false positive on any of my accounts and about 95% or so of all spam gets canned automatically now.
- Security Blanket: Outlook and Outlook Express, are very vulnerable to viruses and other malicious email messages, especially if you have not applied all of the security patches for Outlook and Internet Explorer. I typically have Mozilla Thunderbird set to display email as text only, but even when set to display HTML mail I feel much safer from viruses and trojans than with the corresponding products from Microsoft.
- Don’t Bug Me: Yes, there are some bugs in Mozilla Thunderbird, but so far none have caused me significant headaches. I can’t say the same for my experiences with Microsoft Outlook.