THIS MONTH: Free E-Mail Clients!
Head 2 Head A showdown among natural PC competitors
E
veryday across America, unemployed riff-raff stumble
into their local liquor stores, stare at the selection
of refrigerated beverages and face a choice—Old
English 800 malt liquor (aka OE) or Thunderbird fortified
wine? This month in the Maximum PC Lab we’re also
forced to decide between Thunderbird and OE—
the difference is, we’re talking e-mail clients, not cheapbooze. Microsoft’s Outlook Express (or OE) and Mozilla’s
Thunderbird are currently the two most popular and
widely used e-mail clients, and both are completely free.
But which one should you use? Watch in slack-jawed awe
as we put each app to the test and declare once and for all
which e-mail client you should use.
—JOSH NOREMUsability: Day-to-day
use of both of these
clients is remarkably
similar. Sending, receiv-
ing, and opening e-mail
are very straightforward
processes. Thunderbird
does make sending
images a bit easier in that
you can quickly drag and
drop the images in order
to embed them in the
message or the message
header. Outlook Express
requires menu naviga-
tion to embed an image
in an e-mail. However,
Outlook Express excels in
other areas. It constantly
displays the address
book in the main window
for easy access, while
Thunderbird forces you
to click into its address
book. And Outlook
Express’ toolbars are
highly customizable,
while Thunderbird
only lets you add icon
separators wherever you
choose. All told, it’s a
pretty close category, but
OE gets the nod—just
barely. Winner: Outlook
Express22 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2004
MICROSOFT OUTLOOK EXPRESS
Features: By its very nature, the
streamlined Outlook Express
is rather limited. But one cool
feature it has over Thunderbird
is the ability to add your Hotmail
account to the accounts section
without a third-party plug-in or
utility. Considering the range of
cool features that are included
with Thunderbird , this is an easy
win for the open-source crowd.
Winner: ThunderbirdEase of migration: Outlook
Express users often have to
import and export their mail
when performing a clean instal-
lation of Windows and the app
makes the chore anything but
easy. The included “Export
Mail” function only outputs
data formats compatible with
Outlook and Exchange. And
while you can manually copy
and paste the mail folders your-
self (for import into another
installation of OE, for example)
these folders are difficult to
find. Thunderbird , on the other
hand, imports OE mail quickly
and easily. Unfortunately, it too
lacks an export mail function,
forcing you to follow the same
silly process of copying and
pasting files to accomplish the
task. Both clients could use
improvement in this category,
but at least Thunderbird han-
dles the OE migration process
with ease.
Winner: ThunderbirdExpandability: This category is an
open-and-shut case for Thunderbird.
It’s extension interface means any-
one can develop add-ons to expand
the app’s capabilities, and many do.
Extensions range from a calendar
add-on to an RSS reader and con-
tinue from there, making it far more
expandable than Outlook Express.
Winner: ThunderbirdSecurity and privacy: Outlook Express
lets you disable remote images in e-
mails so spam-senders won’t know your
computer’s identity, but its support of
ActiveX scripting can be a major vulner-
ability (it’s turned off by default, but can
be enabled via the bewildering “Internet
zones” menu). Such scripts can allow
your PC to be hijacked in order to
spread viruses. Since Mozilla doesn’t
support ActiveX controls, there’s never
any worry about mistakenly opening a
malicious e-mail. Winner: Thunderbird