Adrian Try wrote:
What is your experience with the Thunderbird?
I am looking for an alternative to the MS Outlook 2002 which I do
not like at all. I am using Windows XP Home.
Regards,
Gregory
Los Angeles
I'm a pim fan. For years I've reluctantly "used" Outlook in Windows
because of its ability to synchronise with Pocket PC's. I mainly used
Pocket Outlook on the Pocket PC, though, using Outlook mainly as a
place to store the pim data. I also used to use Outlook as my primary
email program, partly so that it would be synchronised onto my Pocket
PC.
In Windows there are alternatives. The ancient Ecco Pro is still
available, and is in the process of being made open source.
EssentialPIM (www.essentialpim.com) is a new promising alternative.
Each program has its own advantages. In Linux, the obvious choices
would be Evolution and Kontact.
But Thunderbird is definitely a worthy contender as an Outlook
replacement.
Like Outlook, Thunderbird does email, and does it much better in my
opinion. It has built in spam filtering, properly threaded email, and
very flexible filtering and searching options. Unlike Outlook (but
like Outlook Express), it also does newsgroups. Unlike Outlook
Express, it allows you to open attachments that don't come from
Microsoft.
Probably the best place for an address book is with an email program.
Thunderbird's is quite good - I like it quite a lot. Searching is
very quick. It doesn't have as many fields as Outlook, but how many
do you need? Using Thunderbird's tree structure, you can have the
same address details in several places (e.g. mailing lists). Updates
to the one address update them all. You can also have multiple
address books in separate files all accessible at once in the same
tree structure.
By default, Thunderbird doesn't come with a calendar app, but the
Sunbird calendar is excellent (available from the Mozilla site). You
can install it either as an addon to Thunderbird (or Firefox or the
Mozilla suite), or as a stand alone application. It has all the usual
features, and can synchronise with an online calendar.
For quite some time you have been able to use the Mozilla suite's
address book as a data source for OpenOffice.org. I'm glad to see
that the 2.0 beta now does the same for the Thunderbird address book.
I'd like to see more cross functionality - that would require a
cooperative effort.
Outlook interfaces quite well with MS Word. In a previous job, I was
able to use the Outlook address book as a starting point as a letter
to be created in Word, or use the Outlook address book as a data
source for a mailmerge in Word. You can even use Word as a source of
email mailmerges for that are sent out back through Outlook. That's
quite handy. Now most of that functionality is available in the
Thunderbird/OpenOffice.org combination.
I'm not aware of a way of using Thunderbird as a _starting point_ for
a single letter in OOo (yet), but I love being able to view the data
sources from any OOo program by pressing F4. I'm only just starting
to experiment with this functionality, but I've found I can drag a
single field into my document, a whole record (which brings up a
wizard for how to insert the data), and even drag the entire table
into a word document (which brings up a different wizard). All of
this looks very promising.
It is also possible to use OOo for bulk mail drops of HTML formatted
emails. In short, it now seems possible to do most of what I was using
the MS Office suite for with a Thunderbird OOo combination.
I would be very interested to hear of other people's approaches to
integrating pims with OpenOffice.org. I'm sure that macros could be
created to add even more functionality.
Adrian
Gold Coast
Queensland
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Hello, i was reading your post with interest, this is something i took
the time to research as well some time back.
One thing you need to be aware of when switching (if you are going to)
to thunderbird. There is NO FACILITY for export of the email. There is
an IMPORT feature, but NOTHING for exporting. SO this means that wehne
you switch over and begi using thunderbird, even for a trial, you have
no way of getting your email bacj out of it. What i ended up doing is
running outlook and thunderbird in tandem for a while, just so i still
had comlete access to my mail folders. Eithe that or you need to setup
your email accounts as IMAP.
Second, you can install a calendar into thnderbird as an extension. It
works quite well.
Third, thunderbird has no real support for signatures. this is the only
real "problem" that I have with thunderbird.
Respectfully,
Deric Stowell
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