Mozilla Thunderbird – an alternative to Eudora
The October 2005 issue of the Newsletter contained an article explaining how to use Eudora in IMAP mode. IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) makes it easier to manage your e-mail from different locations, for example from home and from the office. With IMAP, your mail folders are kept on the server rather than on your local PC or Mac. With the alternative method, known as POP mode, which is what most Eudora users have relied on over the years, your messages are downloaded to your local Mac or PC, and so are not visible when you access your mail from a different location. WebMail is an IMAP mail program, so if you use IMAP on your office desktop computer you will have the same view of your e-mail folders on your desktop as you have in WebMail.
Unfortunately, Eudora does not seem to function as well as it might in IMAP mode, and this, together with other problems thrown up by the more recent versions of Eudora, has led us to consider an alternative e-mail program, Mozilla Thunderbird.
Like Eudora, Thunderbird can be used in either POP or IMAP mode. As with Eudora, you can configure Thunderbird to access different e-mail accounts, so if you are responsible for a non-personal e-mail account as well as your own personal e-mail you can manage both quite easily with Thunderbird. Thunderbird has all the features that one would expect from an e-mail program, including junk-mail filtering, which is a facility you don’t get with Eudora unless you have the paid-for version. Most of our Eudora users have the sponsored version of Eudora, with advertisements in the corner as the price of advanced features. There is just one version of Thunderbird, which is free.
We are not suggesting that everyone should abandon Eudora and take up Thunderbird. If you have not experienced problems with Eudora, stay with it. Not all problems connected with e-mail are due to deficiencies in the e-mail client that you use, so you should not regard a change to Thunderbird as the answer to everything – there’s a lot to be said for sticking with the 'devil you know.' However, if you are thinking of moving to IMAP mode because you need to manage your e-mail in different locations, you might like to consider moving to Thunderbird at the same time.
Notes on downloading and configuring Thunderbird are available on the IT Services web pages:
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/its/email/thunderbird
As listed in IT training courses, there will be a short talk on using Thunderbird at 12.45pm on Thursday 6 April in the Library Seminar Room 2. To book a place, please contact the Helpdesk.
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