I've always used Outlook to view and manage my email, not necessarily because I wanted to, but because it was simply the best all-in-one tool for email, calendar, contacts, and tasks. If you're a power-user like Catherine, Outlook is invaluable for keeping up with all that stuff. But for me, it's always been a bit of an overkill. I basically need something to manage email and contacts, but having 'tasks' and an integrated calendar, while nice, is not really necessary. My schedule just doesn't get that filled with meetings, etc. For this reason, I've been toying with the idea of switching to Thunderbird. Since I use Firefox religiously (unless I'm testing browser compatibility), I've always thought it would be nice to use it's sibling for email. I started to make this switch about 3 years ago, actually. But at that time, the Mozilla email client was nowhere near as good as it is now. There have been some subtle, yet important, improvements to the GUI over the last several years, and some additional features, like the integrated RSS reader, which make it really attractive to me. (You can get RSS add-ons for Outlook, but I've never really been impressed by any of them.)

So I've been on the fence about a switch. But the final straw occurred late last week. I started having trouble downloading mail from my POP3 server. At first I thought it was a problem with the server, so I emailed my tech support. After doing some research with them, I realized the problem was with my Outlook profile, or possibly a corrupt .pst file. I tried using some tools to fix the problem, but no luck. So then I had a choice: I could spend several more hours rebuilding my Outlook profile, which might also necessitate a re-install of Outlook itself, or I could download the latest version of Thunderbird, import my contacts and email, and be up in running in about an hour. I opted for the second choice. I'm now completely on Thunderbird and I'm really glad I switched. The integrated RSS reader is really handy. The only thing I really miss from Outlook is the automatic way it would segment messages in the inbox based on when they came in (today, yesterday, last week, two weeks ago.)

But other than that really minor thing, I'm pretty happy using Thunderbird. One thing that's nice is that, who knows, someday I may completely switch to a Mac. When and if that day comes, I can now do so with a pretty painless transfer of not only my browser settings, but also my rss feeds, email, contacts, and yes, even a calendar, thanks to this extension. Hooray for open source.

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