Thunderbird

Sister project to Firefox is Mozilla Thunderbird. Firefox took the browser, Thunderbird is the email client. One of my favorite features of Netscape Communicator 4 was its email, it was head and shoulders above Outlook Express and comparable many ways to the expensive Outlook.

The gap between Outlook and its little brother Outlook Express has since broadened into a chasm worthy of the Grand Canyon, but Thunderbird straddles the middle ground nicely. It does not have all the funky features of Outlook, such as being able to compose fancy emails in Word or setting up ‘reminder notes’, but it is a vastly superior mail client.

For starters, it deals with multiple email accounts much better. Whereas Outlook permits multiple accounts, it uses one single Inbox and then forces the user to rely on its unreliable filters to move messages into the proper new folder. This is needlessly complex and annoying, and I know of few people with but a single email account. Being a small program, Thunderbird feels a lot crisper. These are differences of a tenth of a second in loading times, but for the purposes of human perception, it feels a lot crisper. Think of how laggy mouse control was a major irritation in Deus Ex: Invisible War, and you have the right idea.

That being said, Thunderbird suffers more from an unfamiliar interface than Firefox does. Most email clients, by default, put the reply on top of the quoted text, but Thunderbird is initially set to replying below. Fixing this was more difficult than one would imagine, since the option isn’t under the menu you’d expect. Rather than being under Tools -> Options and then the Composition or Advanced sub-menus, quote settings are under Tools -> Account Settings. Each account can be individually customized from here, but we’re still baffled as to why Account Settings has the “Composition & Addressing” sub-menu when Tools -> Options already has a Composition category of its own.

Conclusion

The success of Firefox, and by default, of Mozilla itself, is really surprising. The project suffered several disastrous failures – from Netscape’s collapse, through the beta Mozilla-Netscape release under AOL, AOL shutting down the division before later recreating it as a separate foundation – few would have believed in the project after all that.

Firefox is a damn fine browser, better than IE by a clear though not dominant margin at this point in time, but it owes its success more to Microsoft’s stumbling than any huge advantages. Tabbed browsing isn’t a make-it-or-break-it feature, and while Firefox is undoubtedly more secure than pre-SP2 IE, it has never faced the onslaught of attacks that Microsoft has.

Thunderbird, on the other hand, is a smash success when compared to both of Microsoft’s offerings. From Microsoft’s perspective, Thunderbird is likely uncomfortably close to Outlook’s functionality. It doesn’t just fill the gap between OE and Outlook, it could potentially replace Outlook, given time and effort.

While I haven’t had an opportunity to test its spam blocking since my private address doesn’t get spam any more, reports are positive about its effectiveness. It is completely free of course, vastly superior to Outlook Express and while not as feature-rich as Outlook, in terms of not having Reminder Notes and other jazz, it is more capable as an email client and more importantly, it’s free.

It’s not often that a company succeeds from beyond the grave, but you can almost hear Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen shout out “from hell’s heart, I stab at thee Microsoft!” Netscape’s release of its source will at the very least give Microsoft a thorn in its side for the foreseeable future, at worst, it could mean the end of Outlook and Internet Explorer – though the latter scenario is far-fetched today.