Thunderbird 2

Coming from the same stable as Firefox, great things are expected of Thunderbird 2 and Mozilla’s email program does not disappoint. Despite offering a wide range of features, many of them quite advanced, Thunderbird remains instantly accessible and is easy to get to grips with if you’re making the switch from another system, such as Outlook Express.

The program functions incredibly well in its primary role as an email program. A spam filter, which can learn to better recognise spam as individual emails are marked as junk, is highly effective and the interface can be customised using a variety of layouts. Existing emails and contacts can easily be imported from a range of other programs and webmail accounts such as Google Mail are a doddle to use within the program.

Support for plug-ins means that if a feature is found to be lacking, it’s likely that an add-on can be used to get extra functionality. But Thunderbird’s real advantage lies in the number of extras it includes: not only can it access newsgroups and view RSS feeds, but email can be organised in a myriad of ways using folders, tags and saved searches. An effective phishing filter is just one more reason why Thunderbird comes out on top.

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