Atlanta 2004

For home and small-business users who want very good features but don’t want to pay for e-mail, Mozilla Thunderbird is one of the top choices.

Commands are easy to find, and search field provides instant gratification; Type a few letters of the subject or the sender’s name, and a crowded inbox is reduced to the messages that match. In addition you can customize the views with categories like “Unread” or “Last 5 days.”

The program can encrypt messages and attach a digital signing certificate. Thunderbird’s filters automatically file and color-code messages, though theylack Eudora’s ability to match pattern or automatically forward a message. Our biggest complaint is the Thunderbird’s spelling checker works only after you’ve finished composing a message: it can’t check your spelling as you type.

Without any training, Thunderbird’s spam filter caught 18 of the first 25 spam messages it recieved, just shy of the success rate of Outlook’s filter. After our testers finished training it, the filter caught 95 percent of the junk mail it recieved.

Downloadable  extensions allow you to add new tools to the program. among the dozens of add-ons available at the Mozilla Web site are the dictionary search function and support for mouse gestures, which allow you to execute a command (such as opening the next message) by right-clicking and pushing the mouse to the right, for example.

Besides supporting POP3 and IMAP for e-mail, the application serves as a Usenet newsgroup client and as an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader. The RSS reader is a nice touch, and Thunderbird is the only desktop e-mail client we looked at that includes one. Given the growing popularity of blogs, it is a sensible addition to an e-mail program.