Thunderbird Email Client
Thunderbird is an email program created by Mozilla, which is the
same group that makes the Firefox browser. It's the email program I use most of the
time, which means I must like it.
What prompted me to go this route was the fact that I needed to be able to set up multiple email accounts, but didn't want to
have to sign on online in order to respond to people with all those different business addresses. A friend of mine recommended
three products, and this was the most convenient one to use for me.
It's a fairly easy program to set up. All you pretty much need to do is select create an account, put in your email address, and
it will walk you through the account creation process. Once you've set it up, you have the option of setting up different smtp
addresses, if you're able to retrieve your email in that fashion. You can then set up your program, through its email filter tab,
so that, when you're downloading email, it will automatically go to the correct account.
Of course, no program is perfect, and Thunderbird does a few things I don't like. For one, if you have multiple email accounts on
the same server, such as Road Runner, you can only set up mail to
download from as many accounts as you can alter the smtp address. This
can be problematic if you have problems setting up some of your business internet accounts to download email from the host server.
What I've done is set up my internet businesses to have all email routed to my personal email account, and then I can download from
either my personal Thunderbird account or my main business Thunderbird account with the program. However, if I'm in any of the
other four accounts, I can't download from them; mail will be distributed to them, and I can send email from them, but I have to
remember to change the address to that particular account's address so that others will receive it from the correct place.
Also, it doesn't interpret winmail.dat
files at all, which Outlook often sends so you can add their email and other demographic information easily to your address book,
so to read them you'll need to go online and download a program to open them with, if you need them at all, and then copy and paste
the information into the address book. Speaking of the address book, you can set up as many different mailing lists as you wish
to, even putting one email address in multiple lists. It will automatically save each email address you send something to in the
personal email category, which you can decide to use as your main email list or not; I set up a different main email list so I
could separate the ones I wanted to keep for sure from all the rest. However, I have 8 different email lists in my address book.
Thunderbird also allows people to download new themes and some add-ons, or extensions, but not as many as the Firefox browser.
Altering colors and fonts is fairly easy also. And, it's a much more secure email program than Outlook.
I recommend Thunderbird to anyone who needs to manage multiple email addresses for whatever reason. Its ease of use made me
feel pretty good about it, and the constant updates to the program will keep it fit and getting better for a long time to come.
