A Thunderbird Thumbs Up From A Surprising Source
Posted on Friday, February 20, 2004
Here’s a nice endorsement of the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client:
Thunderbird is an almost perfect IMAP client for Windows. If you use IMAP, this is the product for you…
Thunderbird : B+
- Fast
- Supports the delete model I like
- Junk Mail filter
- Internet style attribution
- Supports IDLE
- Easy to find messages and supports server side IMAP search!!!!
- Doesn’t support getting unread counts for all folders
- Supports mailbox quota
What makes this surprising is that this evaluation comes from Omar Shahine, one of the lead engineers behind the Microsoft Entourage e-mail client for the Macintosh. The only product he rates more highly than Thunderbird in his roundup is (surprise!) Entourage — but since Entourage is only available for the Mac, while Thunderbird is cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux), he encourages IMAP users on non-Mac platforms to use Thunderbird instead of Outlook (which he gives a D+ for IMAP support), Outlook Express for Windows (C), or Eudora (F).
Since reading IMAP mail is the primary task that a modern mail client should be doing these days, this is a nice plug from a good source. So, if you’re suffering with Outlook Express or Eudora for your mail, go get Thunderbird and see what Omar is so impressed with!
Sound Off, Loudmouth!
If you’re on a Mac, just use Apple’s mail client. Entourage is the kind of design that only the company who thought Windows 3.1 looked nice could brag about.
It’s sad, because Entourage had the benefit of some of the developers from Claris Em@iler, which was the best POP client ever. Mail.app feels much more like Claris Em@iler than Entourage does.
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A week ago I switched to Thunderbird after a lot of frustrations with Opera. Last night I lost all my IMAP folders (except Inbox)!?! I have no clue what happened.