Thunderbird is an excellent email client by the Mozilla Messaging, an offshoot of Mozilla which created the popular Firefox browser. It has one of the simplest mechanisms for adding new accounts wherein you just need to enter your name, email address and password in order to configure your email account.
With webmail clients getting better by the day, it may seem like email clients are no longer useful. While it may seem so to a certain degree, email clients are far from useless even today. Many web mail services such as GMail provide even more features than a desktop client can manage, however they sill lack offline operation, which is quite important especially in India. Even otherwise, if you are using the email account provided by your organization or ISP it may not provide as much storage, or work as well without an email client.
Thunderbird in its latest iteration has some powerful feature beyond just adding new accounts — which is only of benefit while setting up your accounts for the first time. Some of its most powerful features are also something which Google prides itself over, Search. Thunderbird indexes your email to make is fast, and remarkably simple to find your email messages. The search page lets you refine your results by filtering in / out messages from specific contacts, folders or mailing lists.
The new QuickFilter bar makes it simple to quickly filter messages on interest based on read / unread status, starred status, sender, tags, and attachments. You can also quickly filter messages based on the presence of certain words in the subject.
Combine the search and filtering capabilities of Thunderbird and you have a powerful email client indeed.
Thunderbird is a free applications currently at version 3.1.2; it is capable of updating automatically from the application interface itself, so you needn’t download the latest version every time once you have it installed.
You can download Thunderbird from here.
You can read our review of Thunderbird 3.1 here.