We’re very conscious that when our clients talk about email software for their computers, most of the time they will probably be talking about Outlook. Outlook is Microsoft’s email software which comes as part of the Office suite. It’s very popular and a lot of people wouldn’t consider using anything else – there’s even a version that you can run on your Mac.
However, we don’t use Outlook. We have experimented with it at times but quite frankly don’t get on with it. Our preferred email software is Thunderbird, and has been for the last twelve years. Thunderbird is free email software offered by Mozilla (the same organisation that produces the Firefox web browser). We love it because it does exactly what we need it to do:
It’s Cross Platform
Thunderbird works on Windows, Mac and Linux, so whatever your computer is running you can use it.
Handles Multiple Email Addresses
We can easily manage multiple email addresses within the same software, keeping each separate so there is no confusion as to which email address is being used.
Regular Updates
The software is actively developed by Mozilla, which means there are regular updates to it (which are applied automatically so we don’t have to actively update it ourselves). This means that the software is constantly improving and we can be confident that it is secure.
Easy to Use
We find it much easier to use than Outlook. It’s fully featured but not overly complicated. It does what it does well.
Simple to Back Up
Using the MozBackup tool it’s very simple to run backups of your email. We use the tool to take regular backups and store the backup files on an external hard drive. So if we are upgrading to a new computer or (horror of horrors) our computer goes pop, we can easily reinstate our full back history of emails without losing anything.
Thunderbird is something that we’ve been using for so long that we pretty much take it for granted. But when we hear from a client that their computer has gone up in smoke and they’ve lost all their emails, it reminds us how lucky we are to be able to easily reinstate our email at any time with the minimum of fuss.
Thunderbird does exactly what we need and doesn’t have the frustrations of other email software that we’ve tried using, and it’s free! At this point we wouldn’t even consider using anything else.
