SMJ Solutions

Thunderbird 1.5 Review

January 23rd, 2006

The folks at Mozilla (the makers of the wonderful Firefox web browser) have recently released Thunderbird 1.5, an update to their solid (and free) email client. I have been using Thunderbird for about a year now and have been very impressed with the product; it looks like it has improved even more with the 1.5 version.

Overall, Thunderbird is a very viable option as an email client. While it may not shine in a corporate environment with the need for calendar sharing and other corporate features, Thunderbird is great for the home user. It handles the basics very well. Sending, receiving, writing and organizing email messages is nice and easy, with all the features the average home user needs.

The inline spell checking is a nice addition to this version. Words are spell checked as you type and underlined in red if amiss. I like the automatic spell checking feature, although I’m sure the red lines and automatic correction will eventually produce a generation of the worst spellers (sans computer) the world has ever known.

Unfortunately, having a junk-mail filter these days as part of an email client is a must-have feature. Thunderbird’s filter is very easy to use and gets better as you get more spam. I haven’t noticed too many false postitives (messages that are not spam that get directed to the junk-mail folder) in the past year I have been using Thunderbird. It seems to do a good job.

Setting up Thunderbird was a breeze. It can grab all of your addresses and email from previous desktop clients. Adding and editing email account settings was also very easy. I have several email accounts and I like how Thunderbird handles the multiple accounts. It’s a simple thing to compose an email and send it from one account and not the other.

One thing missing is an integrated auto-archiving or backup feature that would let you easily schedule and create backups of all important emails. Since another key selling point of Thunderbird is all of the extensions (or plugins), someone could write a simple extension that provides this functionality, but it would have been a nice included feature in version 1.5.

In conclusion, I like Thunderbird. It’s easy to use and extend, it has the basic features that most users need, it’s completely free, it won’t propogate viruses, and it does a good job of handling spam. What else can the average home user ask for?

Entry Filed under: Software

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