Mozilla will soon be releasing Thunderbird 1.5, a free and open source e-mail client. For the past year, we’ve been using Mozilla’s Thunderbird as our primary e-mail client. For the past month I have also been testing the early releases of Thunderbird and have found the program to be stable with nice new features. Some of the new features that have been included from version 1.0 to 1.5 are:

1. Sort address autocomplete results by how often you send e-mail to each recipient.
2. Spell check as you type.
3. Built in phishing detector to help protect users against email scams.
4. Deleting attachments from messages (how many times did you want to save keep the e-mail in your Inbox, but not that 4-Meg file of Uncle Albert’s grandson attached with it).
5. Integration with server side spam filtering.
6. Many security enhancements
7. It’s still free

If you’re an Outlook Express and Internet Explorer user, you may have remembered that after a Windows XP Service Pack there were some new security features added to the software. Security improvements included how attachments were displayed or opened and how unwanted pop-ups were blocked within Outlook Express and Internet Explorer. In our opinion, these security features would not have been provided by Microsoft had it not been for the fact that Mozilla was already including these security features in Thunderbird and their browser, Firefox. Microsoft Outlook users likely should also thank Thunderbird for putting some pressure on Microsoft to provide better protection against spam than they previously had. So I have to ask you, why not try Thunderbird out even if you’re happy with Outlook Express? It’s an idea that we liked.

We actually started using early versions of the Thunderbird software, starting with version 0.6, before the e-mail client was officially released as Thunderbird 1.0. Within weeks we dropped using Outlook Express (from a security perspective, 2003 and 2004 were not good years for users of Microsoft’s Outlook, Outlook Express, and Internet Explorer). From time to time, we still use the full version of Outlook for it’s Calendar and Contacts, but those days are far and few between. We are happy to see the improvements Microsoft has been recently making to it’s products, we’re just happier we didn’t have to wait for the new features because we were already using Thunderbird and Firefox.