Popular Email Clients Reviewed - Mozilla Thunderbird
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Mozilla Thunderbird is the email and news client developed by Mozilla Foundation. It is completely free, open source, and cross-platform. The guidelines under which it was designed are the following: superlative security, refined organization, and sophisticated customization thanks to their ability to enhance the client with extensions.
First let's talk about its security enhancements. We have top-notch SSL/TLS support for connections to IMAP and SMTP servers. Native support for S/MIME secure emails isn't neglected either. Because it renders HTML on a particularly developed system, this boosts its overall security.
This solid security is enhanced by a powerful Bayesian-based anti-spam system. Bayesian is a form of spam-filtering that is very capable of differentiating spam mail from legitimate mail. Therefore, its all-around accuracy increases over time because the user is able to make corrections each time a "misclassification" happens.
Additionally, we have a rather impressive anti-phishing filter. However, a lot of additional fixes and enhancements are required in this system. The reason for that is mostly because, unfortunately, phishing techniques are evolving almost on a day-to-day basis.
Now we are going to cover Thunderbird's supreme organizational functions as well as its customizable look-and-feel, due to its ability to import specific themes. You have search functions, message filtering and grouping, and additional labeling options. Multiple accounts are also supported. Themes are a nice thing to have especially for users that enjoy turning their computer experience into a pleasurable one. You can download these CSS packages with images from Thunderbird's Add-on site.
I'd like to point out a great extension. It's called Enigmail. It adds public key support for Thunderbird. Per-account based encryptions, inline-PGP and PGP/MIME, OpenPGP key management interface, encrypt/sign mail, and decrypt/authenticate mail upon receiving are all natively supported. I am certainly advocating its usage.
All in all, I am handing out a combined 9 out of 10 points for Thunderbird. Overall, I'm satisfied with its performance. However, just as with Firefox, particular extensions are pretty much required in order to turn Thunderbird into a very powerful, efficient, and solid email client. What would I improve? Its LDAP support and anti-phishing system.
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