Small Business Networking
Replacing Outlook
Let's say that you've had enough of Outlook. You've been using it for years, but it suddenly comes to you that if Outlook were, say, a car, it would have six wheels on one side and nine on the other, turbo boost on the horn and a fuel-injected radio. The chance of the turn indicators, headlights and windshield wipers operating when you wanted them to would be about 50-50.
Time to look for an alternative, should such a thing be available.
This week we're going to consider the potential for going down the open source route: We're going to consider Thunderbird, which is not only open source but also cross-platform and free.
Thunderbird is produced by the Mozilla Foundation, those fine folks who brought us Gearhead's favorite Web browser, Firefox.
Where to start with replacing Outlook? First, we need to install Thunderbird. This is easy; the 1.5.0.4 release is a 6MB download, and the install procedure is simple.
The license is the Mozilla Public License, a hybrid of the GNU General Public License and the modified BSD license, which is very lenient and less restrictive than many other open source licenses and certainly less restrictive than Microsoft's license.
Next, we need to migrate from Outlook to Thunderbird. Thunderbird's Account Wizard offers you the chance to set up e-mail accounts, RSS feeds and Newsgroup accounts. You can use POP and IMAP servers for incoming mail, and assign each incoming e-mail account its own directory or have them all use the same one.
You might be able to skip this step, because Thunderbird includes an import feature to acquire address books, stored e-mail and e-mail client settings from Eudora, Outlook and Outlook Express. We say "might," because we couldn't import Outlook settings, and the error message wasn't particularly helpful. On the other hand, importing our address book and mailboxes worked fine.
<digression>A useful Web site that discusses conversion between mailbox formats is published by J. Lüthje. Also see the short list of useful mailbox and message-manipulation software on the same site.</digression>
So what does Thunderbird offer that Outlook doesn't? There's better junk-mail filtering. Thunderbird also has a phishing detector.
Thunderbird's message labeling makes sense, with named categories rather than Outlook's unnamed and unnamable flags. But one thing Thunderbird doesn't offer that Outlook does is the ability to add a reminder to an e-mail so you are alerted at a later time.
Other pluses for Thunderbird are better RSS feed integration than Outlook, a message search feature that is faster than Outlook's, filters (called rules under Outlook) that work reliably, user interface theme support, and simpler enhancement through extensions programmed in JavaScript.
The Mozilla site offers a huge library of Thunderbird extensions. Some are incredibly useful, such as adding message tags; highlighting a package-tracking number in a message and then right-clicking and selecting "Track Package," after which a Web browser will launch to the shipper's tracking page; and the display of RSS, Atom, HTML and NNTP feeds in a scrolling area on the status bar.
Can Thunderbird really be considered an alternative to Outlook? The answer depends on what functionality you need. If your primary goal is messaging, then Thunderbird is in many ways a better choice than Outlook, as it is cross- platform, generally faster in operation and highly configurable. The one gotcha would be where Exchange-based calendaring and shared folders are required.
Thunderbird is really impressive, and we plan for it to become the Gearhead standard.
Your thoughts on messaging to gearhead@gibbs.com or on Gibbsblog.
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