Software > Open Source, Web & Email Applications

FAB! Thunderbird 2 is go!

By Lasa Information Systems Team

Mozilla Thunderbird is a powerful, fully featured open source email and contacts application. I’ve been using it for my personal email for some time now and have been very impressed with its ease of use and features. Whilst it doesn’t have all the non-mail features that Outlook has (calendar, for example, but see later for alternatives) it does what it does really well.

Download and installation

Thunderbird is free to download and is available for Windows, Linux and Mac with an installation file of 5.8Mb (for Windows version 2.0.0.4). It’s easy to install and will import data from Netscape or Mozilla mail programs, Outlook and Outlook Express. Once installed, on the first run it asks for your email account, RSS, Google mail or newsgroup account details. I set it up on an XP machine using a Googlemail account and it only needed my email account name to set up. It then asked for the password and went away and fetched the mail.

General impressions

The interface is clean and friendly and can be changed to suit the user’s requirements – for example you can turn the message pane on or off, and position it to the right of the inbox or along the bottom. Status and mail toolbars can be turned off, and the mail toolbar can be customised to show small icons, icons and text, text or icons only.

Mail

Incoming mail defaults to the inbox but message filters (the equivalent of rules in Outlook) can be set up to move it to new folders. Mail can be tagged to indicate whether it’s important, personal and so on. Tags can be added to suit your situation and you can use multiple tags on each message, each tag is coloured for easy reference.

Thunderbird uses a system of local folders in addition to the account mailboxes which are for storing IMAP mail (where mail is stored on a remote server) as a way of looking at it offline, for newsgroup messages and can be used as an archive.

One really nice feature is that folders that contain unread mail stay bold (similar to Outlook) but also show a small star next to the folder to show that new mail has arrived in that folder. That’s really useful if, like me, you have multiple folders and message filters and don’t always have tome to read the mail that’s arrived in one sitting.

When composing mail, unlike Outlook which only auto completes an address if you have sent email to the person previously, Thunderbird will select from the address book which is handy (as long as you keep an eye on who you’re sending mail to!). I also like the fact that once the spell-check has been completed it waits for a click to send it – with Outlook I will sometimes have to restart a spell-check if I spot something that needs changing knowing that once the spell-check is complete it will dispatch it to the outbox.

Junk filtering

One of the celebrated features of Thunderbird is its handling of spam and the intuitiveness of the junk filter. Whilst my Googlemail account is very reliable at filtering out the obvious junk, Thunderbird needs some training. It will have a stab at identifying junk mail and a notice appears with a flame icon saying that “Thunderbird thinks this is junk mail.” It then gives you the opportunity to inform it that it isn’t. Junk which isn’t identified can easily be told its junk which trains the junk filter. Identified spam will then be moved automatically to the junk filter.

Address book

The address book is a fairly basic affair with “cards” recording the usual address information (email addresses, telephone number, home and work postal address and so on) with some custom fields.

You can add outgoing mail addresses to the address book (or choose to turn this off)

Add-ons and themes

As with the rest of the Mozilla suite, you can customise Thunderbird using add-ons and themes. There are some excellent add-ons including one that lists contacts in the folder pane and some sleek themes.

But I want a calendar!

Sunbird calendar is another member of the Mozilla family. Whilst it doesn’t integrate with Thunderbird, it’s a perfectly capable application which also boasts a task list. Of course, you might want to use Google’s calendar instead which is shareable and a bit funkier and also online so you can access it from wherever you are. Sunbird can be shared by installing on a network shared drive for multi-user access.

The interface is easy on the eye and looks fairly slick. The toolbar can be customized and contains icons for new events and tasks, and there are day, week, multiweek and month views. Multiweek is especially useful if you want to look at a number of weeks which overlap different months.

Entering event information (below) is straightforward and allows for repeating and all day items. I found the concept of entering times to either 1 or 5 minute intervals somewhat strange having been used to Outlook’s default 30 minute slots. There is space to enter attendees email addresses but I wasn’t sure why. Sunbird doesn’t have any help information at present and the release information didn’t help… Task entry uses a similar format and both tasks and events allow for alarms which can be snoozed.

Problems

I have encountered problems with updating Thunderbird using the auto-update. The latest update to version 2 conflicted with hardware on my laptop – some Googling around I found the issue and worked around it. I also had a problem with updating an earlier version of Thunderbird and, after backing up the mail, I had to uninstall it and then install version 2. Initially Thunderbird wouldn’t restart but after shutting down, leaving it a while and restarting it magically reappeared with all mail and contacts intact.

Backing up

There is no built-in back-up but you can use MozBackup, free software which will also back up Firefox settings etc.

Help!!

Thunderbird help is online at the mozillaZine Knowledgebase which also houses help for Firefox (a web browser) and other Mozilla products and applications, and is easy to search and find help. It’s written in clear easy language and I had no trouble in tracking down information on the use of local folders or the junk filter. Clicking Mozilla Thunderbird Help on the Help menu takes you straight there.

Mission accomplished?

Thunderbird is a very capable email client which, if you don’t already have Office and therefore Outlook on your PC or you prefer to avoid proprietary software or are just plain cheap, will work very well for you.  It will probably find a good home in smaller organisations or as a personal client. And, as it’s being actively developed and supported by the open source community with the opportunity to install various add-ons and themes, it’s capable of being customised so that you don’t feel like you’re just following the Outlook crowd…