Features

• built-in Baynesian spam filters. The spam filter comes pretrained, able to detect most spam
• anti-phishing
• spell check
• indexed search
• imports from many other email programs including Eudora and Outlook.
• S/MIME encryption but not yet PGP. However, the EnigMail add-on does support it.
• The address book records whether that person prefers HTML or plain messages. This is a feature I have been begging for, for over a decade.
• Some IAPs block you from sendingh mail through any mailserver but theirs. Thunderbird has a feature where you can direct all you outgoing mail through a single IAP mailserver, but marked as if it were coming from your various other servers. You still can pick up mail from your various mail servers.
• It can handle GMail, but not other webmails, without an add-in.
• It has all kinds of add-in applications and themes. I picked the GreenTB theme to give it a distinctive look. It is not as easy to install them, as in Firefox, since you find them with your browser, download them to your local disk, then find them in Thunderbird to install them.

Gotchas

• The place you configure your outgoing SMTP server(s) is hidden in a peculiar place where you would not think to look. Look in the left panel on the Account settings. Scroll down past all your accounts to the very bottom. This will reveal a line labelled Outgoing Server (SMTP). You can then select add or edit. Thunberbird recommends using a single server for all your outgoing mail, usually the one provided by your IAP. This speeds up sending mail since only one server has to be contacted, and means only one server has to be correctly configured.
• The import mail from Eudora failed. I deleted all of Thunderbird’s *.msf mailboxes and tried the import again, this time successfully. When it is done, check over the files in the C:\Users\userid\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\ randomid .default\mail\ You will see it littered with the remains of your earlier attempts to import. You can delete these.
• Thunderbird will not import your signatures from Eudora. Further it lets you have only one signature for each account. You don’t select the signature manually on each message. You must copy the Eudora signature files to a separate data directory, rename them to *.html and then attach them to your various email accounts.
• The logo is somewhat baffling, looking more like a dove than the terrifying black thunderbird of West coast native legend.

Tips

• Thunderbird uses the term write where most programs would use the term compose.
• On Vista, Thunderbird stores its files in:
  C:\Users\userid\AppData\Local\Thunderbird\Profiles\randomid.default\
  and
  C:\Users\userid\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\ randomid .default\.