Thunderbird: Email was never this good

In the past two days I’ve written two articles about the Firefox web browser. The first one was a list of extensions and the second was how to speed Firefox up. When I first used Firefox at version 0.9 I immediately fell in love with it despite how rough around the edges it was. Naturally I also began searching for an Email client which was just as enjoyable to use as Firefox was proving to be.

Eventually after having all but given up hope of ever being free of Outlook I came across Mozilla Thunderbird by the same folks Mozilla who brought us Firefox. Like Firefox it had some rough edges and certainly wasn’t polished to perfection, but that made it all the more appealing in my eyes. Since that time it has come a long ways and added many new features and capabilities to the core program.

If you’re in the market for a new Email client I highly recommend giving Thunderbird a try. There are numerous reasons to do so some of which I have listed for your convience. There are many more reasons, but I figure if this information doesn’t prod you into action the other things probably won’t either.

Junk mail filtering system

Unless you’re the luckiest person in all of creation you no doubt deal with your fair share of spam and other types of junk email. Thunderbird actually uses an algorithm to detect junk mail and put it in a special folder. It gets even better. Thunderbird learns over time and gets more and more acurate as to what is and what is not junk.

For example your boss sends you an email and it is delivered to your inbox. You don’t want business related email coming to your personal email. To rectify this you just mark that email as junk. Usually it only takes once for Thunderbird to start delivering it as junk. Once it does anything coming from your boss is “junk”.

The opposite is true, suppose you want your bosses email but Thunderbird says that it is junk you simply mark it as “not junk” and Thunderbird will learn that email from that person is not to be considered junk.

Multiple accounts

Currently I have 12 email accounts all setup and checked via Thunderbird. That’s a lot of email to keep track of and Thunderbird does a great job of that as well. It has the classic filtering options you would expect in any email client but it goes above and beyond the norm. In a moment I’ll get to more about the filtering, but I wanted to mention it here as it is a big part of my account management.

Filtering

Filtering is basically an automation that allows you to setup the client to do things such as place the mail in specified folders, delete email as it comes in, mark or tag email, and other things such as that. For the most part all email clients have this ability, but Thunderbird has taken it a bit further. One built in filtering feature is to automatically move emails tagged by Spam Assasin as spam to the junk folder. All you need to do is activate the option.

Extensions

Just like its cousin Firefox, Thunderbird also offers extensions for a variety of things.

Themes

Don’t like the default look of Thunderbird feel free to change it using an of thousands of fan made themes.

Those are only a few of the reasons to try Thunderbird. Here is a complete list of the features that are available. If you still need help don’t forget to visit the great folks at Mozilla Zine forums. An unofficial support site for several Mozilla projects.