Thunderbird - Outlook, be afraid, very afraid

Recently I've been using Mozilla Thunderbird.

It's a great email client which gives you access to your usual mail (POP and IMAP) while also being able to read newsgroups and RSS feeds.

For those of you who don't know, RSS Feeds allow you to make a subscription to a site. This could be a news site, a weblog or almost anything. Then, from your RSS reader (Thunderbird in this case) you can see all the headlines and their content without having to go to their site on the World Wide Web.

But that's not the only feature Thunderbird offers, oh no! It has masses of useful and productive features which allow you to better organise your email and be more efficient with your time. You can obviously set Filters, plus things called Searched Folders. These allow you to set a search criteria on a Virtual Folder, showing you all the emails with this criteria in it. An example might be one which shows you all the emails received in the last 3 days, allowing you to view them in one place, while not having to move them from your inbox or filtered folders!

Another useful thing I love is the address book, which can remember who can receive HTML formatted email, and who can only support text based email. Thunderbird will automatically adjust the format of your composed message for each recipient so you don't have to worry about whether you can add formatting to your messages.

And just to top of the platter, Thunderbird supports extensions and Themes much the same as Mozilla Firefox does. This means you can choose what it looks like, and add more functions and features which suit you! It's truly a great email reader being both Open Source and compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.

Have fun with your new email client!