There's a big share of email-users market that sticks with well established, web-based email clients like Yahoo, MSN or the latest G-mail. But the newly released Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 aims to become a better alternative for the dominant email client, Outlook Express. Thunderbird especially targets those points where Outlook Express continuously fails & frustrates its users.

These weak points that Thunderbird exploits are mainly spam filtering and security against email viruses. Mozilla Foundation applied this strategy before with its Firefox browser that competes with Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Officials from the Mozilla Foundation stated they want to offer “a much safer email experience”. Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 has adaptive spam filters and doesn't allow scripts to run by default — a security problem that causes Outlook Express to be so exposed to email viruses.

Adaptive spam filters allow the user to be more or less restrictive with unsolicited commercial email. Saved search folders is a tool that displays each message in a previously defined manner, according to some user criteria. Those messages could be received in separate folders and sub-folders.

The newly released candidate Thunderbird 1.0 features improved migration options for Outlook 2003, Eudora and Mozilla suite users and RSS support. Among the common features you have multiple identity options for the same account, support for IMAP, LDAP and POP3 protocol, support for HTML emails, and a mass email managing tool.

Thunderbird 1.0 is an open source application and runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Update January 13, 2005

Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 is now Final.