Outlook vs. Thunderbird vs. ?

[Miles]

I have been using Outlook for a number of years as my email client. It seems that with each release it becomes more and more bloated with features that are essentially useless to me, especially Outlook 2007. As it is, I don't use half the features and I'm seriously thinking of changing. I've taken a look at Thunderbird and find it to be pretty good, but I haven't actually used it for any length of time and my email is very important to me.

What email client do you recommend?

[jellyrole]

Since your using Vista, I would reccomend using Windows Mail. I got Coxmaster using it now and he likes it. It does what it's supposed to and has a few features but not as many as Outlook.

[Goliath182]

Ive used Outlook and i agree that it has way to many features. Ive used Thunderbird and i like it.

[Scott]

Windows Live Mail is nice also.

[ZhengHe]

Eudora and Pegasus Mail were both fine email clients back in the day, but they quickly became costly and outdated, so I dropped them for Thunderbird. Though there appears to be a free version of Eudora still lying around I prefer to know that my software will stay that way, plus Pegasus Mail has really lost most of it's luster. Personally, I would stick this Thunderbird unless you really don't like it. It's platform independent, have a massive list of features and a long list of addons. That being said you may still not like the program at which point Windows Mail and Outlook are good alternatives. Just nice to know that you can use essentially the same program no matter what OS you use.

[Methious]

I've been on Thunderbird for about 2 years and it does pretty good. Not so bloated it's unusable.

Never crashed, never lost any thing, runs decently fast.

The only thing I don't like about it is when you click on the inbox it seems to want to download the same Thunderbird blurb from the server every time.

I keep outlook express primed with a backup of my email address book but have never really needed it.

[ZhengHe]

Apparently Eudora is working on some sort of addon to merg Thunderbird with the "Eudora User Experience", whatever that means. The project is called Penelope and can be found here (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope#Current_Status). The release date of a stable version is fairly speculative as they have only reached 0.1 in their development cycle. You can also find a beta version of Eudora itself on that site. It has releases available for Linux, Mac, and Windows if you would like to try it out.

[Gizmo-guy]

I used to only use Outlook Express, but went to Thunderbird 6 months ago and couldn't be happier.

[kadiir]

I've used Pegasus Mail for years (since about '97). It's not the best, but for a free program it's pretty darn good. The developer is working on a updated version but it's taking him a long time to finish. Still no ETA.

[slugbug]

I'm using Evolution Mail with Ubuntu Linux.

[Xantor]

I'm using Thunderbird atm. It's interface is clean; I like that.
I'm only using Outlook 2007 for Windows Live, but seeing as Windows Live Mail is suppose to replace it soon, I might switch to the latter. I heard that it has ads in it, not very cool.

[Kougar]

Heh, a bit ironic I'm not the only one not happy with Outlook 2007. :) It integrates easily with my B3D email account, however it will NOT apply the spam filtering which was the entire reason I wanted it. I had zero problems setting this up Outlook 2003, but 2007 refuses to work the same way and I eventaully gave up with it as I could not find the cause or any solution.

Right now I am trying Thunderbird for the first time... a friend of mine uses http://www.cloudmark.com/ with his install of Outlook 2003, but it supports Thunderbird as well and it is a free install for basic filtering purposes. It seems to work better than the built in spam filter, but I've not been using it long enough to say with certainty.