I was excited about Thunderbird ever since I read about it on the Mozilla Website. It’s in 0.1 version and man it rocks. The main thing I was interested in checking was how easy is it to shift to it from lets say Outlook. Well, the import function works perfectly and took less than a minute for a 32 megs PST file. So the shifting issue was not an issue after all. The software looks cool, works nicely. I used it for sometime to send and receive some trial mails and it works fine. I would have shifted to it but for the calendar/scheduler/to-do feature I use in Outlook. I can’t afford to keep both these software running. But if I had to choose the mail client of the 2, I would have picked Thunderbird. Darn, I hate myself for losing the rebellion spirit of doing experiments. I can’t take a chance with the official mails with the job going on…

Now, what do I like about Thunderbird in the few moments I spent using it? Well there are a lot of things.
Its free: Outlook is definitely not. Both Eudora Pro and Opera M2 are free in the ad-enabled version. Mozilla Thunderbird is free in the complete final pro version whatever you call it.
Compatibility: It imported the Mails from Outlook perfectly. Supports importing mails/addresses/settings from Netscape 4 (??) and Eudora too. Plus it stores the mail files in the plain text ‘mbox’ file format compatible with almost all the mail programs. It comes for all the popular operating systems. What more can you expect?
Speed: It is definitely much faster than Netscape 6 mail client I once tried using. Though no competition to Opera.
Supports HTML mail sending: Opera M2 does not support it as far as I know. They don’t seem to be interested in doing that.
No Installation Required: Well, this 1 is a stunner. You just decompress the files and there you go. Eudora too works this way but FireBird is a champion. You even need to create a shortcut yourself to make it more accessible! There is no setup to run…
Cool Looks: I am bored of the Outlook interface and Opera M2 is not a big stunner itself. Thunderbird brings in a change. Eudora remains the most complicated for my taste and still reminds me of the win32 application of the Windows 3.1 genre. Thunderbird looks and feel cool! You got skin support…
Support for Extensions: You think a feature is missing? Well, it must be already there in the form of an extension. This way you can avoid the things you don’t want and keep only the things you need!
Rebellion Feel: You hate M$, no way better than to discard IE for FireBird and Outlook/Outlook Express for Thunderbird. Go the Open-Source way and be a rebellion!

What I think does not make this software a complete product?
Well, its in version 0.1 for god sake! There is this thing in the mind giving you an errie feeling if your job depends upon your mails… Yeeks!
It’s too big a download. 9,149 KBs for an e-mail client without a calendar, scheduler, to-do. This seems like a crime. And there are no small upgrades. You need to download the complete files with the next version. It’s definitely heavier than Opera and Eudora. But it beats Outlook fair and square!
It’s slow as compared to Opera M2 and Outlook.
Well, lets see how open source community goes with its development and how many people actually switch to it.

Memory Consumption is something confusing. Initially, it consumes a lot more. But as I reach completing this article, the memory consumption of the three software stands at: (I don’t, won’t, am not using Eudora…)
Outlook: 17 Megs (With the mails downloading enabled.)
Opera: 18 Megs (2 windows opened.)
Thunderbird: 9.2 Megs (Mails downloading enabled.)

So, my final appeal is:
support this software made by the people for the people. Let us show that we appreciate what they are doing for the free software movement. Surely, you can’t live without Windows, but you can surely live without Outlook!
Maybe the next time Outlook crashes on me, I will shift to it. Damn the calender, I will shift back to age old method of using a planner…