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Aimed squarely at the Outlook Express user base with much of the look and feel of the Microsoft product, Mozilla is pushing many of the same buttons that made Firefox a success - speed and improved security. Thunderbird has intelligent spam filters to help identify junk mail, which can either be deleted or moved to its own spam folder.

According to Mozilla, Thunderbird provides extra security by not allowing viruses or worms to execute automatically. Also JavaScript is turned off by default for mail and news, so an e-mail can't run script code just by being opened.

Thunderbird also offers HTML mail support, IMAP for connecting to Microsoft Exchange and POP support, quick search, saved search folders, message grouping, labels, return receipts, smart address book LDAP address completion, import tools, and the ability to manage multiple e-mail and newsgroup accounts. A particular favourite and one carried over from Firefox is a built in - albeit rudimentary - RSS reader.

You can download the client for free from the Mozilla site. It works with Mac OS and Linux, as well as Windows.