Thunderbird - Reclaim Your Inbox

Thunderbird - Reclaim Your Inbox

Check out Mozilla Thunderbird, I am. I am certainly not a Microsoft poster boy and if the truth were known most I.T. folks owe Microsoft for providing them with buggy code that allows us to have jobs. Heck, if everything just worked then no one would need us I.T. folks around to fix things, right? LOL... What about cars that never blow up or leave us stranded on the side of the road? Where would the auto mechanics go to work then? McDonalds?

Anyway, we live in an imperfect world and we are imperfect people so therefore the stuff that we create become direct decendants of our inability to create something perfect. Our imperfections are cloned right into our creations and therefore there will always be a niche for folks that know how to fix things.

Is Mozzilla Thunderbird or Mozilla Firefox browser 100 percent free from bugs or being exploited by some script kiddie? No, of course not. However, from a support stand point I will tell you that because Microsoft (Mickeysoft) is such a huge beast that has consumed such large amounts of market share and usage that there are way more folks targeting their software than Mozilla.

I have been using Firefox pre release version 1 for quite some time and I have to say that I love it. The problem with using a third party non Mickeysoft application is that MS Office applications and other non Mickeysoft apps will always default to Mickeysoft applications (such as IE) because all of MS Windows OS and apps are fully integrated. So, there will still be that time when you are surfing the web or whatever and Internet Exploder will show up as the default browser. There are also the plugins and extensions situation. When I am using Firefox and I happen across something juicy that I MUST share with YOU via my BLOG I can not click on the Blogger plugin that I have in IE to port the goodie straight into my blog. That means I have to cut and paste my URL from Firefox into IE so I can do that. I guess that is the downside to using different applications that dont have full integration and support from multiple vendors yet.

Ok, back to Mozilla Thunderbird as an e-mail client. One of the things that I absolutely LOVE is that it has a built in Newsgroup Reader and RSS reader. Yes, Netscape has a newsgroup reader but it does NOT have a RSS compatible reader. Outlook 2003 is supposed to have a newsgroup plug in but the instructions on HOW to make this work is so complicated and vague that even I can not make it happen. I spent about 30 min messing with it and finally decided that I would rather spend that time in Blogexpress reading RSS feeds instead of messing with the plugin for Outlook.

E-mail, Newsgroups, web browsing and RSS feeds are all tightly related to one another and I for one am happy that there are products out there like Thunderbird that allow you to have all of the same functionality in the same interface.

If I find something else that is neat or a nugget of information about Thunderbird that you need to know I will blog it for you.