So, what's the deal?

You got Windows? Okay, you've got Outlook Express. This mail client is the butt of a number of jokes. It's been called a "virus delivery system". Recently I heard someone say that, rather than Outlook, it should be called "Lookout" as in "look out, another virus". But does it deserve all this flak? The answer: yes. But despite the security holes and the lack of innovative features, it remains the most popular home-user e-mail client. But could that be about to change? It should do.

Like Firefox, Thunderbird is free and open source. It doesn't suffer from the virus penetration problems or security issues, and it's got a load of new funky features to address the needs of the world's unfortunate spam-infested e-mail users. Read on...

Junk mail handling - I get up to ten items of spam a day on my personal mail account (not my IBM Notes account). I don't need any Viagra, I don't want to buy a hooky copy of Microsoft Office, I don't want to invest money in a sure-fire money-making scheme, and I certainly don't want to pay any money into a Nigerian bank account. Thunderbird's junk mail feature deals with the spam with 99% accuracy - perhaps once a month it'll leave one spam message in the inbox, and then I simply mark it as junk mail and it moves into the junk mail folder. And when I do that, the adaptive filter analyses the mail and then blocks similar mails in the future. Every so often I take a look in junk mail folder to make sure it hasn't accidentally junked a valid item of mail (you can tell it never to treat mail from people in your address book as spam). In the eleven months I've been using Thunderbird it hasn't once junked something that's valid. Outlook Express is way behind on it's spam control - Thunderbird is way out in front.



Themes and extensions - not nearly as many as there are for Firefox, but there's a few attractive themes (such as the Qute default, iCandy Junior and Mostly Crystal), and a few good extensions for mail viewing and changing the user interface.

Remote image blocking - it may not be immediately obvious why Thunderbird has this, but it's mainly a security feature. Not because Thunderbird suffers from the new JPEG virus (it doesn't). No, it's because those vile spammers may be able to detect that your account is active through the loading of remote images - so if you don't load them it decreases their chances.



It's also useful for users on low bandwidth who want to save their precious traffic for something they actually. Of course you can elect to display the images (see above) if you see that the mail is from a trusted source (like the weekly iTunes newsletter) or if the sender exists in your address book.

Why pay for an RSS reader? Download Thunderbird for free and you'll have one. In the same way that you can get live bookmarks in Firefox, Thunderbird allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and see them as if the entries were e-mails or forum items. You have a choice as to whether Thunderbird previews the actual item or displays the summary from the RSS feed (if you choose the latter, you also get a link to the actual item).