Microsoft Outlook is the default email client for many corporate users. With good reason too. It's well structured, highly-configurable, enables you to manage your diary and meeting schedule and links to an Exchange server so you can share information between users. However, it's also very slow. Due to the sheer amount of spam we receive, Outlook can take a while to start, downloading email can take up to half an hour and it is very processor intensive. Searching can be slow, too. Much of this will change with Office 2007, but that's still forthcoming for the average end-user.

For now, we certainly recommend Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5.0.9, which has just been updated with a few security fixes. Don't forget, there's also Mozilla Thunderbird 2, which has recently been released as a beta preview. Still very usable and also recommended.

20 Dec 2006