Moving from Outlook Express

[hughken]

Does anyonr have experience of moving from MS Outlook Express to Mozilla Thunderbird as E-mail program (as recommended in Telegraphs' Bootcamp for Sept 7)? Currently using BT YAHOO, which has fairly good Spam filters, etc., but somehow not to my liking. Also have MailWasher installed, but not enthused with handling capabilities. In particular, any experience of Thunderbird working with Zone Alarm + AVG Free + Pest Patrol + Ad-Aware - I like to keep my machine clean! Would welcome any practical experience.

[scatman]

You won't need much spam protection if you didn't use BT Yahoo. They will sell your email address so you get spam then sell you anti-spam software to stop it...

But if you must, Thunderbird is pretty good and, like when comparing IE to Firefox, it's not a gaping security risk. =) It will import all of your OE contacts and mail so you won't have to spend hours doing that. It also has inbuilt antispam features but I have no idea how good they are. As for all of the progs you listed, it won't interfere with any of them, it'll just replace Outlook Express (if you set it as default) and work just as that did...

I still believe the best thing you can do to guard against spam is to set up a junk account (hotmail or yahoo or something), send site registration forms and stuff to that. Anything important you keep on another account (not hotmail, yahoo, etc)... but that is probably just me =)

[stevie21]

Any compatibilities that you've noticed between these programs and IE are likely to cover security holes which other browsers don't have. I'm sure that each of the progs that you mention will work fine with Thunderbird or Eudora or any other major email client. One thing to bear in mind though, is that Thunderbird does have a good anti-spam engine but takes a while to learn what to block so expect some spam to get past it initially.

[drybroch]

i have switched with no problems. I also use AVG and Zone Alarm, plus Ad Aware and Spy Bot. All seem to work ok and certainly importing was a doddle. Haven't quite decided between Netscape and Firefox, both have good and bad points - Netscape doesn't like my bank, and Firefox always opens on homepage rather than last used.