Mozilla ThunderBird
So, I’ve been using IE and Outlook Express (and now, Windows XP) for several years now, despite my violent dislike for Microsoft’s monopolistic marketing tactics and the obscufactory lack of documentation for their operating systems that leave me, as a skilled systems administrator, incapable of maintaining my own machine due to a fundamental lack of information about how to troubleshoot it… the most common solution I’ve heard to problems with Microsoft products and operating systems is “wipe and reinstall from scratch”. BLEEP THAT.
Anyway… so, why us it? They work. IE is stable (vastly more so than Netscape), Outlook Express is stable, supports IMAP, etc. (idiotic yammering from Microsoft aside, it works just fine in my experience, as long as you’re not overloading the server and network by leaving 10,000 messages and 200 megabytes of email on the server in a single file). Windows XP is the first version of Windows that I’ve found to be both stable, user friendly, and reasonable to administer.
But, recently, I’ve begun to use Mozilla FireBird, instead of IE - it appears to be thinner, faster, and very stable for a pre 1.0 product… it is part of my personal commitment to using GPL’d open source products whereever I can.
And now that Microsoft has poked me by suggesting that it would abandon Outlook Express (then changing its mind and reversing course - Outcry forces reprieve for Outlook Express), I’m downloading Mozilla ThunderBird, their standalone email client, as well.
Attempting to kill OE was nothing more than an attempt to force more people to use Outlook with Exchange, and a back-end attempt to kill a successful open source/standards based protocol (IMAP) that a lot of smaller shops who don’t want to pay someone to babysit an Exchange Server 24/7 are using. Am very glad it didn’t work.