I have to admit, I’m quite a strong Microsoft supporter. I’ve been using their technologies for a long time, .NET and Office are just some of their applications I use regurlarly. However, over the past year, I’ve moved away from several of their applications to third party alternatives, and today, there has been another.
I’ve been a die-hard Outlook user for years (since Outlook 2000), learning to accept its quirks, and eventually live by them. However using a heavyweight mail client that supports Exchange and has a sophisticated calender system just to read e-mails is a bit over the top. This is where Mozilla Thunderbird makes an entry, a light-weight but still fully featured e-mail client. With this, I thought I would also make the initial steps of changing my e-mail address from weiran@tastydirt.co.uk, which I’ve had for two years, to weiran@weiran.co.uk, something more professional sounding.
I’m actually using beta 2 of Thunderbird 1.5 instead of the current 1.0.7. I’ve been using beta 2 of Firefox 1.5 for a while now and I’ve not had too many problems, so I thought I’d give this one a try and it works pretty well. It’s incredibly fast, noticably faster than Outlook, has a decent interface (although Outlooks reading pane and e-mail style is better, as it encourages you to keep your inbox clean of clutter). Also instead of using POP based e-mail, I’m now using IMAP and RoundCube Webmail, which although being in the alpha stages, is an incredibly good webmail client. Thunderbird also supports e-mail signing with certificates so I can prove that I sent the e-mail.
Infact, the only thing missing from Outlook is the excellent Inboxer anti-spam plug-in I use, which has caught in excess of 99% of spam messages I receive (which a short time ago, used to be around two thousand a month). Only time will tell how good the built-in anti-spam filter is in Thunderbird, but I’ve heard good reports that its fairly reliable.
So far, Thunderbird has been a great e-mail client, and one that I will stick to. Although, I’ll still use Outlook as my mail client until I pluck up the courage to set all messages sent to weiran@tastydirt.co.uk to be forward to weiran@weiran.co.uk, which could be a while…
4 Comments
Bloody hell, have you ever tried to read your site? I have to drag the mouse over the text to ‘reverse video’ it.
Bye
I find the contrast fine on the text (and so do anyone else I’ve asked), maybe you need to tweak your monitor.
I’m afraid I have to agree with “me” mate, it knackered my eyes, i turned off the style in Firefox to read that.
Well, maybe its just my monitor contrast is set low then (I don’t like super-bright screens). But I do admit that the standard style is easier to read, and seeing as this article is so long I’ll stick to this one for now.
Also me, you can reveal your identity, criticism is welcome…