-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 En/La Adrian Try ha escrit, a 28/05/05 15:35: |> 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 | Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com Thanks for the interesting posting, Adrian. One thing I didn't quite understand is, can you now use Thunderbird with your pocket pc? My friend is using Outlook (not express) on his desktop because he uses it on his palmtop. He'd be happy to switch to TB if it could also run on his palmtop. Cheers, Jonathan -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)
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