Small Business

Should You Switch to Thunderbird?

By Rick Broida

Updated on: September 25, 2007 / 12:00 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

Many business users rely on big, bloated, complicated Outlook for e-mail because they think it's the only available choice. Not so: There's also Thunderbird, the mega-popular open-source e-mail client from the folks who brought you the Firefox Web browser. Marketing Pilgrim offers 10 reasons why you should switch to Thunderbird; here's a sampling:

Open Source Add-ons: Forget waiting around for Microsoft to update Outlook with that killer feature you know would rock. There is a whole community of developers out there doing just that with Thunderbird add-ons. If someone else hasn't gotten around to developing your ideal feature, you can always do it yourself!
RSS Management: Sure, there are a ton of RSS readers in both software and web form, but wouldn't you prefer to read your RSS feeds in the same application as your email? Thunderbird has integrated RSS support. Even better, you can browse through the list of messages for each feed in its own folder and delete the posts you've already read or don't want to read. New messages automatically appear the next time Thunderbird checks for new messages. I'm able to keep up with 70 some odd RSS feeds with ease.

Surprisingly, the author failed to mentioning tagging, one of Thunderbird's major benefits: You can tag messages in much the same way you can label them in Gmail, which is great for organizing and searching your mail.

Would you consider switching to Thunderbird? Have you already made the leap? Or are you happy with your current e-mail solution? Share your thoughts in the Comments.