I’m an email junkie. There, I said it. I have at least 20 different email accounts.
Why? Well, between the church and YMX I operate a bunch of sites and each one has an "adam" account and a "generic" account for information. Then I have my personal email and stuff like that. So before you know it or can control it… you end up with 20 email accounts.
How to manage that?
Thankfully all of them are POP3 based accounts meaning I can have use one resource to manage them all in "one" account. The question is always… how do I keep stuff sorted in the right places?
In July, our church went to an exchange server system so I lost the capability to have all over my accounts go to my Microsoft Outlook on my laptop. I then tried to use gmail’s POP3 manager to have all of my accounts sent there. While it worked great, I didn’t like that it didn’t use my outgoing server to send mail so YMX email wasn’t coming from my YMX accounts but rather "on behalf" of my accounts. So I started looking for an email alternative.
That’s where Thunderbird comes into play. It’s made by the same people as Firefox, the best Windows web browser. I’ve now been using "the Bird" a few days and have some initial reactions.
Setup: Pretty standard and fast. The settings look like and act just like Outlook. The learning curve was actually very minimal.
Account management: It has a wizard to run through for adding POP3 accounts. That was really no problem if you know all your passwords, addresses, and incoming/outgoing server information.
Downloading email: Again, this acts a lot like Outlook in that you can either have it go look for mail every ___ minutes or you can do it manually. Just like Outlook you can have email with various subjects or email accounts or subjects sort to various folders. I found this process to be a little easier than Outlook.
Sending email: Very easy. I like that you can set-up different signatures for different accounts easily. All you need to do is create an html file and point that account to it on your local PC. So YMX accounts can feature this while non-YMX ones won’t. I love that!
Spam: The one thing Thunderbird definitely does better than Outlook is handle spam. It learns the types of things I label as spam and then automatically filter them into a spam filter, deleting them on my schedule. And flagging it is as easy as a click. Very cool.
All-in-all, if you are looking for an Outlook alternative to manage your email… look no further than Thunderbird. And you can’t beat the price… it’s free!
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