Time to ditch Outlook? 9 e-mail clients tested


Contents
Introduction
 Avoiding e-mail worms
 Barca
 Calypso
 Eudora
 Lotus Notes
 Outlook
 Pegasus
 Pine
 The Bat
 Mozilla Thunderbird
 Specifications
 Final words
 Editor's choice
 About RMIT
About RMIT IT Test Labs

RMIT IT Test LabsRMIT IT Test Labs is an independent testing institution based in Melbourne, Victoria, performing IT product testing for clients such as IBM, Coles-Myer, and a wide variety of government bodies. In the Labs' testing for T&B, they are in direct contact with the clients supplying products and the magazine is responsible for the full cost of the testing. The findings are the Labs' own -- only the specifications of the products to be tested are provided by the magazine. For more information on RMIT, please contact the Lab Manager, Steven Turvey.

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Talkback 16 comments

    What about Opera; another free ...Anonymous -- 20/02/05

    What about Opera; another free browser with a built-in email client. I mean, if you are going to give top honors to a free client, then you should look at the other free client also. This review justified itself largely based on the failing security of outlook, but if that's your main concern, don't get thunderbird no matter what. I mean, come on, IT'S OPEN SOURCE. It doesn't get any less secure than that. It doesn't have the market presense of outlook, but if it ever does look out -- there will then be incentive to use it as the vehicle for viruses, and it will be childs play since it's open source.

    Opera, with it's email client, is free, not open source, and actually attempts some things that are revolutionary. I don't think that it would win your shoot-out, since it tries to be different and takes a lot of getting used to. I don't even think that I like it the best of the ones that I try, but I respect it for what it is trying to do and the fact that it is much more secure than outlook.

    Just my 2 cents; I'm tired of hearing about Mozilla/Thunderbird when I have seen time and again that it is an inferior product to my current favorite.

    Open source is not less secure Anonymous -- 31/01/07 (in reply to #120113487)

    Please. Open source may have no secrets, but most of the bugs that leave Outlook open to attack are because not enough people are looking at the code...
    If you think a MS server is more secure than a Linux one you're nuts. Both require work to keep up to date when bugs are found, but with open source anyone can provide the fix as opposed to waiting around for MS to admit and repair the problem.

    Big review and not a single wo ...Anonymous -- 22/02/05

    Big review and not a single word about Exchange compatibility???

    Have you guys heard of Novell? ...Anonymous -- 25/02/05

    Have you guys heard of Novell? If security is the main concern, surely you need to look here. Of course the client is less than half the issue - the mail server is probably a bigger issue. I'm looking forward to the mailserver review.

    Wish you have put Netscape mai ...Anonymous -- 08/03/05

    Wish you have put Netscape mail in your review.

    Time to ditch thunderbird? Rob -- 30/09/05

    Yet another review praising thunderbird.

    Im just getting too frustrated with how badly thunderbird handles mail after a few months of use - It slows down exactly like ye 'ol Outlook. I've had enough of waiting for folders to reindex, accounts to compact and especially finding my lost email whenever thunderbird feels fit to randomly change my home directory. Why should i wait 5 minutes to sloooooowly move 10,000 junk emails to the bin? Im not asking it to calculate the trajectory of a nasa flight to mars and back!?

    I've been checking the net for email package review sites, low and behold, every reviewer bends over for mozilla - its free this and free that, pffft... I wonder if ANY used thunderbird long enough in a work environment for its arteries to harden with the sludge of months worth of email, spam, attachments et al? I bet not - Im going elsewhere.

    Opera has done a fine job so far. Its fast (so far) thats all i want.

    I've used Thunderbird for two years now Anonymous -- 31/01/07 (in reply to #120121563)

    I haven't noticed any of those problems.
    Could be because I archive my old mail and delete the junk though.

    Re: Time to ditch thunderbird Glenn Sanford -- 17/11/05

    Thunderbird 1.5 RC1 Rocks... I can now delete huge groups of e-mails with a single highlight. Also Autoreply and Autoforward were two features that weren't well handled and needed. It's now part of Thunderbird...

    Thunderbird is average John Cislowski -- 03/01/06 (in reply to #120123429)

    Thunderbird is far from perfect and is a rather immature product. However it behaves itself well with IMAP which most clients fail pitifully at, including outlook.

    On this it gets my vote, till someone with a better overall product fixes their imap support.

    Also a solid mention should go to the Opera browser mail client it is quite adapt and the best in any browser.

    Barca 2.1 Anonymous -- 07/05/06

    Forget Outlook. This is the best, most complete and reliable mail client there is. With its rock solid .mbx data file structure (unlike the dreaded .pst of Outlook), a great interface, reliable spam filtering, superb mail filtering, focus box for fast searching, this program just keeps on getting better and better.

    Barca Anonymous -- 02/08/06 (in reply to #120134005)

    As someone just managing to keep his head above water re email volumes, I agree Barca is probably the best program going. My main frustration is that it's planner and calendar add-ons are not inter-connected (so you have to key in appointments twice) and also the calendar doesn't print-out appointments -- which means I have had to buy yet another add-on software (Calendarscope).
    It's now 2006, I have been using email since the early 1990s, and am still waiting for someone to develop a comprehensive, professional email system. Why is this so hard when the world is now reliant on email?

    Barca 2.1 Anonymous -- 07/05/06

    Forget Outlook. This is the best, most complete and reliable mail client there is. With its rock solid .mbx data file structure (unlike the dreaded .pst of Outlook), a great interface, reliable spam filtering, superb mail filtering, focus box for fast searching, this program just keeps on getting better and better.

    Thunderbird gets the bird Brian Collins -- 12/09/06

    I agree - yet another ridiculous praise for Thunderbird. Why do computer geeks like this thing? (Because they want an underdog, and only because it's not Microsoft). Seriously! I'm a professional business user and I tried it for about 3 months. As much as I wanted something other than Outlook, I noticed that the whole time I kept trying to find downloadable 'extensions' to get it to do what it SHOULD do out of the box (so to speak). I was endlessly wrestling with the beta-like software - and I'm in the tech industry! I suppose if you don't care what fonts your e-mail uses, or about email signatures, and would rather use plain text (courier) for all your e-mails, by all means, this pile o' crap is for you!

    Over the past month I've been trying all kinds of e-mail/calendar/task "PIM" softwares, and most recently I've come upon Barca by poco systems which seems to do a great job. But as much as I hate to say it, I'm finding myself, once again, awaiting Outlook 2007. I wonder if this is the case for many others out there.

    Isn't it time zdnet news actually had some quality to it? Anonymous -- 13/02/09

    When you review email clients, its best to actually get the latest version (Outlok 2007) and to examine the products in detail, rather than just a quick skim over to get to the end result of voting Mozilla Thunderbird the best - the answer you'd already decided on before writing the article.

    Outlook is one of the only choices for anyone with a serious business and multiple staff due to its data sharing features through Outlook. The ability to share calendars, view others email, share and view task lists and contacts make it unique. Considering its bundled in with Word and Excel (both excellent products that lead the market) on new pc's for $259 its hardly expensive at $87.00

    As of 2009, Thunderbird is GOOD Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu) -- 13/02/09

    I've been using Thunderbird for five years (on WinXP and Ubuntu) and I have all twelve years of emails in my mail directory. The only issue is that I nominated a top-level directory "\Mail" rather than using the assigned buried one, for ease of backing up the email data.
    Searches are fast, spam filtering is OK, and the system never loses its set-up, even with frequent PC overheat/turn-offs (ie no proper exiting).

    There's a new alternative to Outlook called StratoVista MAF -- 28/03/09 (in reply to #320123172)

    “StratoVista is designed to be to Google Web Services what Outlook is to Exchange Server.”

    More here:
    http://publishersnewswire.com/2009/03/24/PNW862_125227.php

    and here:
    www.stratovista.com

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