mozilla thunderbird with lightning & mobile master

Thunderbird is a stand-alone email client that is highly configurable, and a sinch to mangage all your emails. It’s capable of some very funky stuff. It’s better than Microsoft Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook on so many levels. In fact, it’s better than Microsoft on any level, and I maintain it is THE BEST email client there is.

Did you know that with Microsoft Outlook you CANNOT bulk export contacts to a non-proprietary format? Microsoft will lock you in, do not be fooled by the Bill! (Did you get it? The Bill as in Bill Gates and the bill you had to hand over to get the software.. sorry that’s just lame ).

Click on the logo to download the goodies.

What’s that you say? Microsoft Outlook has an integrated calendar system? Welll WHOOP-DE-DOO!!!! After a couple years of waiting, and helping to test Mozilla Sunbird (a standalone calendar program) and Mozilla Calendar (the Thunderbird plugin of Sunbird, which is essentially the same thing). Anyway the point is, there is now Mozilla Lightning, which aims to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Mozilla Thunderbird. Eventually, Thunderbird with Lightning will superceed Sunbird/Calendar and be a highly competitive alternative to Microsoft Outlook. I am using it at the moment in it’s pre-release stage and it is quite impressive.

If the only thing stopping you now is the fact that you need Microsoft Outlook for synchronisation with your PDA/mobile phone, then think again. Mobile Master is a commercial program which I happen to have a spare license or two for, which serves all your mobile device desires. I am currently using this for phone number synchronisation with Thunderbird, and playing around with Lightning albeit backing up my calendar files regularly since data loss is expected to occur with this release of Lightning (v0.1).