Mozilla Thunderbird

Thunderbird defaults to a preview pane, email listing and vertical folder listing.

The Wide view extends the preview pane to the length of the screen.

With the Vertical View, folders, message headers, and preview are each displayed in vertical columns.

Writing an email message is simple. This interface is somewhat less cluttered than Outlook Express, but adds more powerful features in the pull-down menus.

Images can be resized to fit comfortably into an email message. Here I shrunk a 2272x1704 image into something small that fits in an email.

Thunderbird displays RSS like email messages, but adding the feeds isn't easy.

The full web page can be displayed in the preview window for each RSS feed entry.

Or, to save on bandwidth, you can choose to display just the article summary in the preview window.

Functionality can be added to Thunderbird via extensions. Only nine are available today, but more should be released over time.

You can change the look and feel of Thunderbird through downloadable skins, although none of the older ones will work with version 1.0.

It's easy to create filters to process incoming mail.

Thunderbird includes an easy way to cut down on the amount of spam in your inbox. You can let it decide on its own, or teach it what's bad.

Thunderbird can automatically identify spam, but it uses basic rules to do so, and occasionally makes mistakes. Here it marked an incoming (non-spam) message from GMail as junk because it had an attachment.