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In some ways, Thunderbird 16’s open-source origins are a blessing. This free email client from the makers of Firefox—aided by a legion of dedicated volunteer programmers—offers more add-ons and customizable features than Apple’s Mail 6 (
) or Microsoft’s Outlook 2011 (
). But freedom and flexibility have their drawbacks, too: Thunderbird looks and works like a tool built by committee.
Bare-Bones to Start: Thunderbird requires you to download add-ons just to get features that other email clients come with by default.
The stark gray interface seems like a holdover from Thunderbird’s distant origins as Netscape Communicator. And the initial feature set compares poorly to those of Mail and Outlook: Third-party add-ons give Thunderbird calendar features and the option (after a very long setup process) to view message threads as a seamless conversation, but Thunderbird lacks such capabilities by default.
The program allows you to view HTML messages and see photos and other attachments inline, but only after you search through the menus for ways to activate those features. And although you can group messages by threads, you can’t page through all the messages in a thread at once; an unhelpful preview shows you tiny scraps of each part of the conversation, after which you must click through to each individual message.
Thunderbird does permit you to add color-coded tags, à la Mail and Outlook’s flags, to individual messages. You can change the names of the five default tags, or create new ones. But tagged messages don’t show up globally in the left navigation pane. Tags serve only to sort messages in search, as well as in Thunderbird’s Quick Filter within a given mailbox.
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