Review: Mozilla Thunderbird

by dralston

February 6, 2004

Last Updated October 2, 2004

First, let me say I am pretty new to this software and far from an expert. I long used Eudora and probably a year ago started using IncrediMail. I actually liked that quite a bit. Even though cutesy, it did offer a lot of the usual options. However, I ran into some serious problems with it (that I won't go into) and was forced to stop using it. After trying a couple other programs I settled on Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4 and have been using it.

I would have to say that it is more of a geek type program. I am not a major geek but it does take some work to get it set up the way you want it. I do tend to want to tweak things to fit my desires. It turns out to have most features I want, and it does support multiple e-mail accounts. You can import your address book and mail from Outlook (and some program I found also got it from Incredimail to Outlook and then to Thunderbird). I will leave it to you to review their features. Some that are not native to the program are done by an "extension" feature and a form of self-designed stationary can be created with "templates" (took me forever to figure out how to get a background image, but it does it!). Thunderbird has many features to deal with junk mail once you've downloaded it. Though I filter my e-mail through a SpamCop account I still get a bit of supposed "opt in" stuff I don't want. In addition to the usual "rules" setup, Thunderbird has a junk detector that you "train" (by identifying junk using a button). It then scans any incoming mail for what it thinks is junk and immediately moves it to a junk folder for review, thus getting it out of your inbox (if you trust it, I think you can have Thunderbird just delete it. but i don't even trust my own rules). Sort of like Yahoo's "Bulk Mail" but you have some say in what goes there. It seems to work reasonably well. It has put a couple things in there that I do get regularly and is not junk, but once I identified them as "Not Junk" it stopped doing that. So for the most part I am not having to write rules. But the rules setup is fine for directing certain periodic mailings from a place into the folder I have set up for it. For those who'd prefer to process junk mail on the server instead of having to download it, the free email checker, Pop Tray, integrates very nicely with Thunderbird and adds the feature of checking mail right on the server. Thunderbird has a built in spellchecker (not as you write, but you can set it to do a check before you send the mail.

Thunderbird also includes a newsreader, and I did set it up. News servers show up just like other e-mail folders. It is similar (not surprisingly) to the Netscape newreader that I used a few years back, but I still prefer to stay with my Forte Agent. The only thing I like better with Thunderbird's newsreader is that it displays images in the message without having to download them.

Of course the price is right (free) and it does have lots of documentation and a support forum, which was helpful in a couple of cases. I'm using it with Windows XP (Personal Version), but Thunderbird 0.4 is available for Windows 98 and higher, Mac OS X, and Red Hat Linux 7.0 and higher, and it has been translated into several different languages.

The only complaint from correspondents was from my sister, who still uses IncrediMail. She says it will not let her reply to my e-mail when I have replied to hers but she can reply if I started a new message. Go figure. I may throw that one out on the Thunderbird support forum.

In addition to Thunderbird, I use a GroupWise client at home currently to collect my office mail as that is the system we are on. After I installed Thunderbird, I got an error message about some file when opening GroupWise and the program would not open. It had to do with a shared DLL. But, like so many of these things, I found the answer on the web. You have to indicate in Thunderbird that you DON'T want it to be your default e-mail program. Apparently if you did, it would change that file in a way GroupWise did not like. As soon as I did that, GroupWise worked fine again. Funny thing is though, it seems like if I click a mailto or mail link it does open Thunderbird (which is what I want) so I am not complaining!

So right now I would give it a guarded thumbs up with all the caveats given above. If you want something pretty vanilla and to be able to use it "right out of the box" with an extremely easy user interface, you may not want it. If you like to tinker, you may enjoy it. It took me a while to get comfortable with it so if you are the impatient type, probably don't use it. I cannot compare it to Microsoft Outlook as I have never actually used that (I have nothing really against it other than its popularity seems to make it a regular target for virii when a vulnerability is found).

NOTE: Three days after this review was written, Thunderbird 0.5 was released, with bug fixes and improvements.

UPDATE, May 9, 2004: I never upgraded Thunderbird. After looking at the features and seeing nothing I thought was that major, I decided to leave well enough alone. I want to say after the several months since I wrote this review, I contine to love the combination of PopTray and Thunderbird. I have the PopTray icon always in the tray and have various alerts set and auto-check on. That lets me instantly see my three mail locations, see what is there, and if there's anything I want right now, I just open Thunderbird from the messages list! Absolutely seamless!

While I do not use the Thunderbird newsreader as my primary one (I use Forte Agent) I do have occasion to use TB from time to time. And I sometimes want to download an image. Many of those are now in a new encoding called yEnc. If this means nothing to you, you probably need go no further.

The fact is that most newsreaders (Agent is an exception) do not support yEnc encoding. This includes Outlook (as far as I know), Free Agent, and Thunderbird. But another little light piece of free software that takes care of that is called yProxy. It magically (to guys like us) changes these clients to yEnc compatible. And quite transparently. Instead of getting a screen of characters, with yProxy you get the image right in the Thunderbird message window and you can simply right-click on it to download if you want it. The most recent version, which I discovered when researching this addendum, even has a progress bar to show the image loading to the screen, which Thunderbird does not.

So now this is a three-part experience. But the thing I would point out is that, for those who want everything in one neat package, once it is set up, it all acts like one piece of software with a whole lot of nice bells and whistles.

UPDATE, May 19, 2004: I finally upgraded to Thunderbird 0.6 a few days ago, but I had a problem getting it to integrate properly with PopTray, so I went back to using Thunderbird 0.4. Today, with some help, I fixed the problem, and now I'm using Thunderbird 0.6 again.

UPDATE, October 2, 2004: I recently installed the latest version (0.8) of Thunderbird to a new laptop from scratch. I like some of the new features so I also updated my desktop from 0.6. The update was smooth but best to get some directions and I like to backup the data. It is also easy to export/import your address book to a new setup. Since my two computers are networked, it was even easier.

A couple features I liked in this version. The appearance is a lot cleaner and more professional in many aspects. But what I really liked was a feature called Global Inbox. It is nice if you have multiple accounts but would like to receive all your mail in one inbox. Actually I had accomplished it in the old version via rules (you can set distinct rules for each account). So all my incoming mail is sorted by rules into various folders in Local Folders and those for which there are no rules goes into a commom inbox. I find it a lot better that way, rather than having an inbox for each account, though you can still do that if you want.

Regarding Thunderbird's integration with the PopTray email checker, they continue to be a seamless integration, allowing me, among other things, to set a variety of e-mail alerts and preview my mail on my various mail servers. There was absolutely no problem continuing to use PopTray with this latest version.

I would also highly recommend that if you use Thunderbird, that you sign up for and use their Support Forum. I have usually had my questions answered there.

Here is a discussion I had in the Thunderbird Support Forum when upgrading (with some helpful hints).

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