I have made it no secret that I prefer my Mac to the PCs that I am forced to use & deal with at work & play. I have used many Mac based email clients. At work the choice is Apple Mail and home Microsoft Entourage 2004 with Thunderbird used lightly for personal mail at work. Apple Mail is the obvious choice as a universal application to be used around the office. It is the simplest to use & contains the tightest integration with the Mac OS. I chose Entourage at home originally because I had always used Outlook back in the OS9 days and address book import was very strait forward. In additions I always felt that I needed more than a FREE email client could provide me. Over time *read using the same client since 2004, I wanted to see what else was out there. So I tried Eudora at first & hated it, Mailsmith was also on the list, but I never made it there. I tried Thunderbird 1.5 and was getting great results. Around that time I also started to play with IMAP accounts instead of strictly POP as I had done in the past. This proved to make my life much much easier having to manage email from work to home (& eventually to a mobile device). Compared to the poor IMAP performance & interface in Entourage vs. Thunderbird the decisions was easy. I made the switch & now Thunderbird 2 is my client of choice to manage my personal email. Now I am not sure who exactly these people are out there using a web based service for checking mail? I mean this just seems so inefficient to me when pulling from multiple accounts (I have about 6). IMAP is helping me keep things in sync across workstations & Thunderbird is helping me use IMAP it really is a simple as that.

Now the majority of readers here are of course going to be PC users and in case I failed to mention what I thought was obvious, like another recommended Mozilla product Firefox, Thunderbird IS cross platform. So PC & Unix users should give this FREE option a try. I recommend running it in conjunction with your current client & just switch over 1 account at a time to see what you think. If you are currently using only web-based email then this would be an ideal alternative.

Mozilla Thunderbird 2 now available: “Mozilla Thunderbird 2, the latest version of the popular, free and open source email client, is available worldwide today…”

(Via MacMinute.)