I too ditched Thunderbird for Outlook. The refrain must be very, very annoying for Thunderbird developers, but the lack of an integrated calendar was just a death-blow to my using Thunderbird.

To your comment about searching, I have terrible email sorting habits (which is to say, I have none), so I have found the various desktop search applications to be a huge timesaver. I tried all of them and while I think Yahoo's search is more robust out of the box (indexes very fast, searches all the filetypes I needed), I actually settled on MSN's desktop search. It's lightweight on my puny laptop, has pop-up, search as I type results, and just feels "cleaner" (very scientific, I know).

There is one reason that I continue to use Thunderbird: support for GnuPG and OpenPGP.

Less of a requirement for me, Bill - I have no secrets! Well, *few* secrets, at least!

Ryan, some time ago I bought X1 Desktop Search - it's really excellent. Looks like it's the power behind the Yahoo Desktop Search (http://www.x1.com/about_us/more_info.html).

I jumped ship too a few weeks ago - thunderbird whilst "nice" simply did not play with the rest of my software...in particular the calendaring integration...there's more support/integration for outlook out there and to be honest I am not prepared to have my most important networking tool (e-mail, contacts and calendar) be hi-jacked until the "open source fellows" get round to building more stuff that improves my efficiency.

I agree the spam filtering in OL 2003 is pretty good. I use AVG for virus trapping and that seems pretty good.

What's more good ole Bill G is doing some good humanitarian stuff in other areas these days and I am tired complaining how bad microsoft is...maybe I'm getting old...

This is business folks. "I can't play with your software and be your beta tester." Give me something that does what I need. I'll put up with a lot as long as I get the basics. Give me at least the equivalent of outlook or I'm gone. Well...actually...I've already gone ;)

Now www.plaxo.com that's another whole ball game.

Finally I'd be very interested to hear how others migrated their information back into outlook from Thunderbird.

One article to the issue discussed here: http://www.pcsympathy.com/article816.html

Having looked through all these comments, it seems that the main problem you guys have with Mozilla Thunderbird is that there's no calendar. Well, Mozilla have developed a very good calendar application, which can either be standalone, or integrated into Thunderbird. The one that works inside Thunderbird is called Lightning and it includes pretty much all the features of Outlook's calendar, including features enabling you to create events directly from an email, quickly and easily. You can download Mozilla Lightning here:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/

Enjoy!

Andrew

Jon,

If you have Outlook 2003, then why bother switching to Thunderbird? It's more powerful than Thunderbird and it integrates better. Especially the rules I can apply in Outlook knock the spots of Thunderbird and the calendar/tasks works very well too.

For searching I use Copernic Desktop Search (pretty good) and Spamihilator to intercept spam. It works like a charm and although I am not a Microsoft fanboy, Office 2003 is rock solid for me.

That does not mean one ought to ditch Thunderbird, because it does a good job, but professionally speaking I would stay with Outlook.

I was trying to go with an Open Source product, but I agree that Outlook is far more powerful, and Thunderbird is underwhelming for someone with my email load. At the moment I'm using Gmail to avoid the hassle of downloading mail to my PC - given my mail load, that can be pretty arduous. However Gmail also has quirks, and I find that I occasionally miss responses to messages because they're hard to spot. Gmail's design - all mail viewed in conversation mode and labels instead of filters - is not always the best for a power user.

While mozilla claims that thunderbird is more secure than Outlook, actually, Outlook 2007 is more secure and robust in real life test.

Thunderbird responds to a number of invisible links that automatically inform remote hackers, spammers or companies your have read their malicious emails, undermines users' privacy and security and opens vulnerabilities to remote hackers, while Outlook does not.

I do not know why many magazines wrongly claims that thunderbird is more secure than Outlook and says Outlook is vulnerable to virus. This is simply incorrect. Any Windows email client is vulnerable to virus. A virus than can infect outlook and infect thunderbird too. Virus is a problem of Windows operating system, not particular email client.

Mozilla Thunderbird staff think thunderbird is being used by many people so they do not work properly any more. I have informed Mozilla many times the thunderbird vulnerability but what they are doing is covering up thunderbird security holes.

So, thunderbird is not secure but rather, its developer deliberately conceal many thunderbird vulnerabilities from knowing by public

Mozilla Thunderbird is more a competitor to Windows Mail (former Outlook Express) than "the big Outlook".

It's like comparing a Fiat 500 with a Koenigsegg CCR

;)

Well, After outlook express and outlook 2002 gave up on me last night until the wee hours of the morning I was trying to recover one or both! What a nightmare.. in the end I downloaded Thunderbird and love it,(within minutes it was up and running and had imported all my email and contacts! It is customizable and the Calendar and Task functions are the same as Outlook.

Re: Virus's if you have a good virus scanner - AVG!- then no probs.

By the way I agree with the comment on Gmail - which I use with Thunderbird (POP access) as responses are hard to spot due to conversation string nature of Gmail, however as usual Google and Mozilla excel with free software and in my eyes can compete with the Big Mighty Microsoft!

Sure each has their quirks, but so does Office, Outlook and all Microsoft products!

Has anyone checked out www.openoffice.org - open office is brilliant (be careful switching from Excel to their equivilant though as some formulae don't work - although the rest of the suite is fabulous (at the office my Word 2003 crashes the computer so I use Office Writer for all word processing and there is the nice little "save as PDF" button right there (save having to print to CutePDF)

Open source all the way...Wordpress, Firefox, Thunderbird...all Google apps!

I only use Firefox because it tops IE. But in terms of mail clients, I think outlook 2007 is better because it is much more professional and many dedicated personelle put their hours into making this application while thunderbird comes with barely any features (i know extensions lightning etc.. but common it should be preinstalled) Also outlook 2007 knows how to automatically register most of the common known emails (e.g gmail hotmail yahoo) but thunderbird only knows how to register gmail (SSL bandwith and stuff).

I've just started playing with Thunderbird 2. Initial impressions are great. We have spam filters and antivirus etc running on our mail server and frequently users would not be able to download a random email msg as Shoutlook would pop up server interrupted timeout errors, this would then cause duplicated mails sent to their client app. but tested known bad messages with Thunderbird and hey-presto it comes thru instantly. Im not gonna force everyone at work to swap yet as people dont seem to like change but Im seriously considering it, maybe when Thunderbird gets integrated fully into OpenOffice v3 (i believe). "Open source all the way..." damn right!!1!

I like Mozilla however I do not use the local folders in Thunderbird, and I have 2 email accounts setup so when i log in, it has both accounts listed and will check all email. However, I have found it impossible to backup and save my email as my email is not listed in the profile folder apparently if you choose not to use the local folders. I've searched the internet and the only info is that it's in the app data folder but in fact it is not. So if you save lots of email and feel it's important ot keep at all costs, then look elsewhere. MozBackup utility don't work. I've tested this over and over.