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Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Software Review

Review for: Mozilla Thunderbird 2

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Introduction

From the same company that brought you Mozilla Firefox, comes Mozilla Thunderbird, a feature-rich, and easy-to-use email client.

Installation

Thunderbird setup is fairly simple, allowing you to import settings from competing email clients, and chose your installation path. Once installed, adding an email account couldn't be simpler providing you have the details offhand.

Features

RSS Feeds

Thunderbird allows you to view your favorite RSS feeds, as if you were viewing your email. Adding a feed is as simple as clicking a button and entering a URL, and it's nice to be able to keep track of what items you have read and not read. Also it'll alert you in your tray when you have any new feed items.

Message Tagging

When certain messages arrive that have a higher priority or significance over other email messages, you can tag them by right clicking on the email, and choosing a tag for it such as "High Priority" which will appear in red, or "To-Do" which will appear in Green.

Webmail integration

Thunderbird provides simple integration with popular webmail services such as Gmail. By providing your account name and password, you can view your webmail in thunderbird with ease.

Phishing protection

Thunderbird has some fantastic ways of filtering your incoming mails that it think are suspicious and may be trying to phish or spam you, and it marks them with a label to highlight the fact.

Message/Spam Filters

Compared to Microsoft Outlook, using Thunderbird's mail filtering system is a breeze. You can filter by a field such as Subject, and then choose an action to perform if it matches the filter. Filter rules can be applied per inbox, so if you want to filter out spam in the one mail account, but organise mail into seperate folders on the other, it couldn't be easier. Unfortunately whilst Microsoft Outlook provides masses of options to match text in your email, Thunderbird does not. More importantly, Thunderbird fails to allow you to filter emails based on the content (body) of the email. This is Thunderbird's major downfall. Most email can be detected as spam by looking for keywords such as "Viagra" in the message body, but no such option is provided, meaning auto-deletion of spam is near-high impossible as it's risky deleting emails based on their subject or sender.

Extensions

Another one of Thunderbird's downfalls is its lack of extensions. Unlike it's bigger brother Firefox, there seems to be little valuable extensions available for Thunderbird to improve your email browsing experience.

Positives

• Simple user-interface
• Good spam/phishing detection
• Lightweight and faster than most of its rivals

Negatives

• Lack of major developer community
• Inability to filter messages based on their content (body).

Conclusion

Mozilla Thunderbird, is an absolute joy to use. It's quicker than Outlook and it's easier to use than Outlook. But where it lacks majorly is in its message filtering. As mentioned earlier in the article, the inability to filter emails based upon their body text is the key-factor that has lead me not to adopt this email client, and revert back to Outlook. Had this feature been implemented, I wouldn't think twice about migrating. As a result of this major downfall, the rating for this software must be vastly lowered.

Editors Rating: 5.5/10

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