Thunderbird – open source PIM

Now it is time to say goodbye to MS Outlook, MS Outlook Express and start giving your email a fresh new home free from constraints. Mozilla’s Thunderbird is extremely handy to organize your email, contacts, and even appointments.

Thunderbird can handle well the task of managing your emails with POP and IMAP accounts. For those who don’t know by the way, IMAP is used to synchronize your email account directly from the server. This means that the email will be viewed through your program but also be stored on the server, not downloaded entirely to your computer, a good thing if you check your email from several locations.

Thunderbird is fast, has some nice security measures to protect you from phishing and bad scripts, and it plays nicely on different platforms (Linux, Windows, and Mac OS). What I also enjoy a lot about Thunderbird is the extensions available for the program, expanding greatly its functionality.

I’ve used Thunderbird for many years now and recently their calendar extension (called Lightning) has made the perfect program to be my PIM program (personal information management). I handle my emails, appointments, and contact book.

Important: if you sync your contacts and calendar with a Palm device, unfortunately Thunderbird is not for you. This is the only serious gripe I have about the software.

My Thunderbird is setup on my Windows partition, then I did a copy/paste of my profile to my Linux install and for mobile purposes I have it installed on my USB pen drive.

Give it a try, you’ll be able to get this software up and running in no time.

For more info and download, visit Mozilla’s Thunderbird page, or grab the portable apps version.