Thunderbird is an open source, cross-platform, and free email client that has found a way to countless users’ hearts for their emailing needs. It’s clean and modern graphical interface always competes with the major paid email clients in both Mac and Windows. In Linux, Thunderbird has single handedly won over huge chunk of of user-base from all other email clients combined. On the day of its release in in 2004, the total Thunderbird downloads were 1 million within 10 days.
There are many reasons for the popularity of Thunderbird.
- It’s free.
- Supports essentially all modern technology and email format such as POP, IMAP, LDAP, S/MIME standard, RSS/ATOM for news-feed, etc.
- It’s modeled after Mozilla Firefox, another popular web-browser
- Many tech-savvy Users love open-source, community-driven apps.
- There are many plug-ins developed by users and community that exceeds Thunderbird’s in-built functionality.
- Thunderbird has many useful features that are hard to find in other free clients or PIMs.
- Supports TLS/SSL Connections
- Although, originally just being a simple email client, an extension called Mozilla lightening (now installed by default), makes it a complete personal information manager (PIM).
- Big library of themes, downloaded as CSS and image files via add-ons, for modifying the look and feel of the interface.
- It supports common file formats Mbox and Eml for data importing/exporting needs.
- Support for big files attachment. The feature is called “Filelink” – Thunderbird allows users to upload a big file to an online service and send the link to the receiver without actually attaching the file. It may not sound like a feature at first, because anyone can do that in any email client. But the difference here is that Thunderbird automatically does it for you. It also treats a ‘Filelink’ attachment as a regular attachment and will show it to you along with other attachments in the email, if any.
- Available in more than 50 languages, thanks to the widespread adoption due to being free and open-source. However, it doesn’t support email address internationalization.
- Thunderbird, due to multiple plug-ins, has several features and options in order to manage, search, and arrange your emails.
- If you have any coding experience, you can even modify the client according to your needs, and submit the source code to community for others to use.
Many people wish to move to Thunderbird from Outlook. Or they have Outlook data stored in Pst files and they want it to import to Pst. If you are one of those, you might be disappointed that Thunderbird doesn’t have support for Pst files. And the manual migration is equally terrifying for less-experienced users. They are lengthy, hard to do properly, and could also make your data seem muddy.
The solution is to convert Pst files to Thunderbird compatible database, and then import the files to Thunderbird. “PST Extractor Pro” will let you do that very easily.
Hope you enjoy Thunderbird, be it in Mac, Windows, or Linux. Very few email software are cross-platform with a very supporting community.