What is your experience with the Thunderbird?
I am looking for an alternative to the MS Outlook 2002 which I do not
like at all. I am using Windows XP Home.
Regards,
Gregory
Los Angeles
I'm a pim fan. For years I've reluctantly "used" Outlook in Windows
because of its ability to synchronise with Pocket PC's. I mainly used
Pocket Outlook on the Pocket PC, though, using Outlook mainly as a place
to store the pim data. I also used to use Outlook as my primary email
program, partly so that it would be synchronised onto my Pocket PC.
In Windows there are alternatives. The ancient Ecco Pro is still
available, and is in the process of being made open source. EssentialPIM
(www.essentialpim.com) is a new promising alternative. Each program has
its own advantages. In Linux, the obvious choices would be Evolution and
Kontact.
But Thunderbird is definitely a worthy contender as an Outlook replacement.
Like Outlook, Thunderbird does email, and does it much better in my
opinion. It has built in spam filtering, properly threaded email, and very
flexible filtering and searching options. Unlike Outlook (but like Outlook
Express), it also does newsgroups. Unlike Outlook Express, it allows you
to open attachments that don't come from Microsoft.
Probably the best place for an address book is with an email program.
Thunderbird's is quite good - I like it quite a lot. Searching is very
quick. It doesn't have as many fields as Outlook, but how many do you
need? Using Thunderbird's tree structure, you can have the same address
details in several places (e.g. mailing lists). Updates to the one address
update them all. You can also have multiple address books in separate
files all accessible at once in the same tree structure.
By default, Thunderbird doesn't come with a calendar app, but the Sunbird
calendar is excellent (available from the Mozilla site). You can install
it either as an addon to Thunderbird (or Firefox or the Mozilla suite), or
as a stand alone application. It has all the usual features, and can
synchronise with an online calendar.
For quite some time you have been able to use the Mozilla suite's address
book as a data source for OpenOffice.org. I'm glad to see that the 2.0
beta now does the same for the Thunderbird address book. I'd like to see
more cross functionality - that would require a cooperative effort.
Outlook interfaces quite well with MS Word. In a previous job, I was able
to use the Outlook address book as a starting point as a letter to be
created in Word, or use the Outlook address book as a data source for a
mailmerge in Word. You can even use Word as a source of email mailmerges
for that are sent out back through Outlook. That's quite handy. Now most
of that functionality is available in the Thunderbird/OpenOffice.org
combination.
I'm not aware of a way of using Thunderbird as a _starting point_ for a
single letter in OOo (yet), but I love being able to view the data sources
from any OOo program by pressing F4. I'm only just starting to experiment
with this functionality, but I've found I can drag a single field into my
document, a whole record (which brings up a wizard for how to insert the
data), and even drag the entire table into a word document (which brings
up a different wizard). All of this looks very promising.
It is also possible to use OOo for bulk mail drops of HTML formatted
emails. In short, it now seems possible to do most of what I was using the
MS Office suite for with a Thunderbird OOo combination.
I would be very interested to hear of other people's approaches to
integrating pims with OpenOffice.org. I'm sure that macros could be
created to add even more functionality.
Adrian
Gold Coast
Queensland
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