Labs

Just as Mozilla reckoned it could do better than Internet Explorer with its free Firefox web browser program, so it takes on Outlook Express with its Thunderbird email program.

As if to rub it in, Thunderbird bends over backwards to make it easy for you to ditch Microsoft's email software. The first time you run it, an Import Wizard allows you to choose between importing address books and account settings from Outlook or Outlook Express.

Once the 6MB download is up and running, Thunderbird is almost Outlook Express's doppelganger. Although it dispenses with Outlook's Contacts feature, Thunderbird uses the same basic layout, with mail folders running down the left, a folder contents pane across the top and preview pane below.

A few improvements on Outlook Express are immediately obvious. Among the options appearing in the preview pane as the program starts is a link to open online information on 'Saved Search Folders'. When you use the program's Search feature to look up email in any or all your existing folders, you can save the results in a new virtual folder. This is a quick and easy way to arrange mail

A feature Mozilla refers to as its Global Inbox makes it easy to organise your mail. Messages within each folder can be sorted according to various attributes, including date, sender, recipient and priority, with different rules applied to each folder.

Unlike Outlook Express, Thunderbird can download only the headers of email messages from POP3 accounts, which is just as well, because its spam-filtering facilities will take a little while to get going. This is because they're based on Bayesian statistical methods. These allow the program to learn which messages you regard as spam, according to the words they contain. You have to train it manually by marking individual messages as they arrive. If, for instance, you tell it that an email containing the word 'Viagra' is spam, then that increases the probability that subsequent messages containing the term will be labelled as spam and are treated accordingly. The technique is time-consuming at first, but allows very precise filtering in the long run. Like Outlook, Thunderbird blocks images in email messages that are hosted on remote servers, as this is a common means by which spammers find out if an account is active.

With the only extras being tools to read and manage newsgroups and RSS news feeds, Thunderbird is a bread-and-butter email program, but it works. A small download size, minimal setup and an instantly recognisable interface make this an obvious alternative for Outlook Express users. It might not be quite as flexible as RITLabs' The Bat!, but it's free.