Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Review & Download

Email client Thunderbird is less known to the masses than Mozilla’s increasingly popular Firefox browser, but it’s still becoming a very popular tool. Thunderbird has a range of features that help you customize and organize your email. If you’ve been using a native client or indeed a web based service for a while, why not take a look at our Thunderbird review and see if you could benefit from the programs impressively large feature set.

Installation and Setup

Thunderbird doesn’t suffer from the same memory usage problems as Firefox so it’s actually a very lightweight program. In our tests it required around 50% less RAM than Windows Live Mail, another popular free client. The program installs to around 24MB of space. It can import details from other popular email programs such as Outlook, which will save you time during the initial setup although adding new accounts is a fairly quick process regardless.

Ease of Use

Thunderbird 2 can function as simply as you need it to and if you just want a program that can receive and send emails using HTML or plain text formatting, download attachments and create folders, it’s as good as any other program. The difference in email clients is similar to that of browsers however; it’s their unique features that really make or break the program.

In this arena, Thunderbird seems well equipped. You can tag your messages not only with standard ‘important’ tags but with your own customized options, so you can set which emails are from work or home, which ones have to do with a certain project and which ones you need to deal with later in the week. If you get a lot of emails or use the same email address for your work and personal life, this can be a very useful feature.

Another intelligent feature is quick access to popular email services that mean you can setup an account in a few seconds if you use Gmail or .Mac – Hotmail is absent from this list due to the way Microsoft run their mail servers and not due to any oversight from Thunderbird.

There are plenty of other features available that we don’t have space to run through, but even if you’re not happy with the default feature set you can always download different extensions and themes to increase the programs functionality and appeal.

Thunderbird is easily one of the most flexible and useful programs available for managing, searching, and organising your emails. If you’ve not tried it yet, give it a go – if there’s anything you find the program can’t do, you can probably find an extension that will make it happen.

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Filed in: Linux, OS X, Windows