For a long time I have been using Microsoft outlook 2000 as an email client, largely due to inertia. I had it, it worked, why change. Recently I have been having a problem where when outlook shuts down, it doesn't shut down cleanly, making it hard to shut down the PC. So, clearly time for a change.
I had a look at a couple of freeware email clients, and finally settled on Thunderbird, mostly because I was already using firefox. I like the client and the look and feel, but the set up was a bit of a pain. Thunderbird happily imported my outlook folders (which was excellent), but it only imported half the account information. It didn't bring across the username/password, and it didn't provide any option to add them to the account it had imported. In the end, I deleted the existing mailbox and created a new one. The automated setting detection got the wrong info, but the manual setup (referring back to outlook for the correct settings) eventually worked.
The second part to replace was the Outlook calendar. It turns out that Mozilla also have a calendar app, called Sunbird. There is also a version called Lightning which is an add on to Thunderbird. I tried Lightning first, and found that the latest full release available on the Mozilla site (0.9) doesn't work with the latest version of Thunderbird that I had just installed. So I went back to Sunbird, which works fine.
I can see why people who are not computer savvy would have problems getting things working, given the amount of stuffing around I needed to do.
Still, now things are up and running it is looking good. And I can't argue with the price!
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