Twitter: I'm amazed at how much screen real estate is lost by misconfigured Word 2003 toolbars on the average employee's computer. http://ff.im/5r99 4 hrs ago

Mar

2

Exit Outlook 2007, Enter Thunderbird 2

Email, Mobile, Nokia, Outlook, Thunderbird 

So I moved from Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird this weekend. Though I’d been looking for an Outlook replacement for a while, the Nokia Synchronizer app (which I use heavily) worked only with Outlook, so that kept me from moving.

Things came to a head Saturday morning, though, when Outlook 2007 took 15 minutes to download 45 pure-text messages, keeping my (admittedly puny 4200rpm) hard drive spinning all the while. Yes, I auto-archive to a separate archive PST every month and de-fragment my hard drive every couple of months, but performance has been terrible from day one. This could not go on.

Moving to Thunderbird is not an easy task. You need to export all your PST to Outlook Express (which takes forever) and then import all of that into Thunderbird (which doesn’t take all that long). I’m pleased with the results, though.

What’s improved?
* Performance has been very good indeed (and we’re talking well over 10000 emails, most of which are in one massive “Archive” folder).
* Spam filtering is much, much better (Outlook had too many false positives and *yet* spam occasionally landed up in my inbox).
* Less UI clutter. Thunderbird’s interface is far more customizable than Outlook’s. The new Ribbon UI in Office 12 is very useful on Word, PowerPoint and Excel, but is just clutter on Outlook. I longed for the Outlook 2003 look all the time - far less clunky.
* Extensibility. I added the GmailUI, Lightning, Nokia Synchronizer and Duplicate Contact Manager extensions immediately.

What have I had to give up?
* Interoperability with Nokia’s PC Suite! That was the *only* reason I stuck with Outlook for so long. Thunderbird’s Nokia Synchronizer can only sync contacts. I need ToDo lists, Calendar events and Notes.
* The Today, Yesterday, Last Week list views. They were incredibly useful, and I hope Thunderbird 3 incorporates that.
* Flagging messages as tasks.
* The ToDo pane, which listed upcoming calendar events and ToDo tasks.

Will post updates in the weeks to come whether the move’s been successful.


Bookmark this post if you liked it:  

You might also be interested reading:

Viewing 4 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    I am glad that you ditched Outlook for Thunderbird. I have using Thunderbird since God knows when. It is fast, easy to you and best part fully customizable. Ever since I started using it I have had 100s of computer crashes, resulting in 100s of OS re-install and changes. Never have I had any problems getting my mail,contacts and appointments back to the way they were before and all this was so easy. Only thing I am waiting for, is a mobile device with Thunderbird in it. I do not know of any. If you have any suggestions. Please feel to email me.
    • ^
    • v
    I'm not sure how long I'll stick to Thunderbird, Venky. I'm not enjoying the experience too much.

    More on that in an update to this post.
    • ^
    • v
    hmmm..reading your post i was quite impressed and wanted to ask you directly as to what protocol you were using for mail downloading. I am more than positive that your experience using thunderbird would be really great from all perspective except...the mail downloading part. If you were to use pop3 there isn't much of a problem cause you don't need a server copy...but IMAP would be a drag and not something I prefer running on my office laptop. BTW it works well on my desktop where I constantly poll my mail server and also ensure that I download the mail for off-line use.I've used multiple other mail clients and with all I have the same problem. IMAP as a protocol was not built for speed. Infact with Evolution I tried OWA (Outlook Web Access), where it polls the exchange server through web. This was also a drag. Unfortunately exchange needs Outlook....after all that is how they keep people like me from moving to linux.
    • ^
    • v
    Bipin,

    i.) I've never been an IMAP fan for precisely that - performance and drag.

    ii.) Should prob. have updated this post. Lost all my data when my hard disk crashed a few weeks ago. Have moved almost to an almost exclusively online lifestyle, and I daresay it's working well.

    Details on how I migrated my life online here: http://www.rahulgaitonde.org/2008/04/14/moving-...
 
close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus