I’ve recently switched to using Thunderbird on the PC to check mail. I still use apple mail on my mac, I just separate certain mail accounts between the two. (because I have way too many email addresses!) But I’m liking thunderbird so far. So much so that I had to jump in rejoice as I found many of the features I can use.

Top ten reasons why I like Thunderbird so much:

1. It has junkmail protection. I’ve noticed though that sometimes it doesn’t move the emails marked as junk to the junk folder like I told it to. But that’s minor to me.
2. I can easily manage multiple email accounts. It’s a snap to manage each account, and I can keep different accounts in different inboxes without setting up rules (ala Outlook/Outlook Expresss)
3. It does a good job of protecting versus malicious mail. I don’t have to worry about malicious images, or code that is made to “hack” your windows. Nice.
4. The filters are robust. Filtering is an important part of my e-mail life. I must have robust filtering rules and thunderbird Really comes through.
5. When I tell it that an email is junk it will auto move it to the Junk folder for me. This may seem small, but this is a feature I love that’s on apple mail.
6. It actually flags mail as junk. So far the success rate of the junk mail filter has been about 99%. This is great!
7. It has extensions. Extensions can make your life easier, especially things like the Dictionary extension that looks up a word for you. Nice.
8. It has good IMAP support. Most email clients don’t support IMAP. Thunderbird does. And works very well too. I have a couple of IMAP accounts I check, and this has been easy to work with.
9. It has RSS reader support. This was the clencher for me. I read a lot of websites via RSS reader, and now that I have a program that checks both RSS and mail, I can get rid of the dedicated RSS reader. Fortunately for feeddemon (what I used to use for RSS), Thunderbird while good, has some features it needs in RSS reading.
10. It’s mozilla. ’nuff said.