Thunderbird -- The Best Mail Client EVER!

So my friend Chad introduce me tonight to Mozilla's "Thunderbird" third-party mail client. It's absolutely phenomenol! It does like everything I need it to and it does it so effortlessly, it's jus so incredible.

It's format is similar to that of Outlook Express so if you are familiar with the basic functionality of OE you'll do fine on Thunderbird.

To get a copy of Thunderbird go here:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/

Now here's the BEST part about Thunderbird... remember the downloading hotmail to OE or Outlook I was having awhile back? Well it's solved! Thunderbird has an extension that allows you to get mail from all the top mail servers: hotmail, yahoo, gmail, aol. Once the little Web Mail extension is added to Thunderbird you just have to install the extensions for the mail host you want to use and Voila! it can be added through the create account screen, and if that weren't enough you can download all your folders too!!

The extensions can be downloaded here:
http://webmail.mozdev.org/

You just click on the "Download" button on the left-hand side then:
1. Right-Click the link above and choose "Save Link As..." to Download and save the file to your hard disk.
2. In Mozilla Thunderbird, open the extension manager (Tools Menu/Extensions).
3. Click the Install button, and locate/select the file you downloaded and click "OK".
4. Then close Thunderbird and re-load it for the extension to sync with the program.

Then you can download the extension packs for any of the mail hosts you use and follow the above steps closing & re-loading the program between extension installs.

Another neat little extension lets you minimize Thunderbird to the system tray so that when you get mail a cute little message pops up by the clock to inform you of such.

That program can be found here:
http://minimizetotray.mozdev.org/

Oh!! And another great thing about Thunderbird is how easy it is to back-up! Nothing as piddly and stuip as OE or Outlook, everything is stored in ONE (1) folder on your hard drive!!


"Manual Backup
Backing up Firefox and Thunderbird manually is as simple as copying their respective profile folders to another location. If you do that, you’ll have a full backup with all your setting and personal data saved.

The hard part is finding the profile folders. First up, they are not located where you would expect to find them. Secondly, they are located in different places for different versions of Windows. Thirdly, they may be assigned random file names that make them difficult to recognize.

On Windows 2000/XP machines the locations for your Firefox and Thunderbird profiles are respectively:
C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\

C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\\

On Windows 9x/Me PCs they can usually be found at:
C:\Windows\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\

C:\Windows\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\\ If you can't locate your profiles then check out this document for more information:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Folder#What_is_in_my_profile?

On my XP laptop the profiles are:

C:\Documents and Settings\Ian\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.ebq

C:\Documents and Settings\Ian\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\25ve0lz5.default

To back these up I copy the profiles to an external USB drive. It's as simple as that. I do it manually but you could also use Windows Scheduler or a backup manager to do the job automatically. Make sure, though, that Firefox and Thunderbird are not running before you backup. "

There's also a tool that will do it for you, it can be found at the link below along with the rest of the info from the above quoted article:
http://www.techsupportalert.com/how_to_backup_mozilla_firefox.htm