Alternative Email Clients

For those of us looking for a bit more power behind our email than Outlook Express
might allow us, there are other options. In this article I'm going to focus
on two of them. The first is Eudora, and
the second is Thunderbird.

One of the major problems with using Outlook or Outlook Express as our mail
client is backing up and restoring our emails, and the second is moving our
emails to other systems. Eudora solves this for us, by importing emails and
attachments, along with our address books for us. In the last few years of installing
Eudora for clients and importing the Outlook files, I've never had a problem
with the process. Eudora then allows export and import in a much more stable
way.

So why bother moving to Eudora? First reason is that Eudora is much faster
to work on than Outlook or Outlook express. With the speed of computers today
this isn't much of a reason, but it is still true. The biggest reason however
is email parsing and filtering.

Eudora has a parsing engine that is better than any other email client I've
worked with to date. If you are like me, and get hundreds of emails every day,
most of which don't really need to be read this instant, but one or two that
needed to be read (and sent) yesterday, then you are going to love Eudora's
ability to parse through emails, place them into separate folders and draw your
attention to what you deem as the most important items in the pile.

Eudora also has a great search engine for finding emails you remember but can't
pin down exact dates or who might have sent the message. The search is ultra
fast, going through thousands of messages in seconds.

Eudora comes in two versions, one is free and the other is paid for. Both of
them are exactly the same, with full functionality. The free version pays for
itself by displaying ads in the corner while you have it open. It is a great
way to figure out if Eudora is what you are looking for in an email client,
before purchasing the non-ad version (unless you don't mind the ads and then
you are home free).

The next email client we will look at is Thunderbird. Thunderbird is created
by the Mozilla teams, and is now on version 1.5. I use to use Eudora exclusively
until I met up with Thunderbird. Thunderbird is absolutely free. It is very
fast on any computer. Stores messages in an easy to back-up and restore folder
system, imports your messages from Outlook Express, Outlook, Communicator and
Eudora. It also boasts a good message search (though not quite as good as Eudora's).
What attracted me to Thunderbird however was the SPAM filter, and it was the
filter that kept me using it as well.

Thunderbird has a 'learning' SPAM filter. As you go through emails, and notify
Thunderbird that a message is SPAM, it learns from your choices, and begins
to mark messages with similar content as SPAM for you. Thunderbird of course
has 'white list' functionality, so that anyone in your address book would not
be marked as SPAM, and when you go through your Spam folder, you can mark message
as Not SPAM and it learns from that action as well. In a very short time your
SPAM filter is very sharp, saving you hours of time and frustration.

Another very cool feature of Thunderbird is all of the extensions created for
it by the team and other programmers in the Mozilla community. There are way
too many to list here, but some of the better ones that I use regularly are:

Notary
-- Adds a notes pane to the message view. Any text typed is stored against the
message for later review.

Track
Package -- This extension makes it easier to track a package when the web
page or email does not provide you with a link to the shipping company's tracking
page. Simply highlight the tracking number, right click, and click "Track
Package". It will automatically determine which company's tracking page
to go to.

Allow
HTML temporary -- This extension allows HTML temporarily enabled/allowed
in the selected message with a single click. When switching to another message,
it'll be shown automatically in plaintext or simple html mode (if this is your
default mode).

There are 100's more to look at, some are fun, some are very useful, all of
them are free.

So if you are looking for alternatives to Outlook or Outlook Express, these
are two very good places to start.