I have been using Microsoft Outlook for a long time but I am not very comfortable with it’s response time with the IMAP mails. It’s very slow and hangs in the way. So I started to search for other good alternatives to Microsoft Outlook. I discovered many but liked only three of them.
Mozilla Thunderbird:
Thunderbird is an email client which is really very good in speed and has features similar to Microsoft Outlook. For calendaring and to-do lists, Mozilla provides add-ons to Thunderbird. Lightning is one add-on which does a great job of organizing stuff within Thunderbird. I use Thunderbird and highly recommend it. The good thing about it is that it’s free and open source.
Download:
Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (6.4 MiB, 1,168 hits)
Opera Mail:
The second mail client I like is Opera mail client. Opera is famous for its sleek and slim design and doesn’t take much resources while running. It’s very easy to configure. When I configured it, there was two types of configurable accounts, POP3 and IMAP. I use IMAP so I configured it for my IMAP account. But I like that my email clients is integrated in my web browser so that I open one browser for everything web related.
Download:
Opera 9.63 (7.1 MiB, 839 hits)
emClient:
I have recently discovered this email client. It was impressed with it’s speed. It seems to be really very fast when fetching email from the server. I like the interface of emClient. It can be a very good alternative to Microsoft Outlook as it also includes a calendar and to do list.
Download:
emClient 1.5 (unknown, 1,705 hits)
Update: I would also recommend Zimbra Desktop from Yahoo. I’m using it and am very comfortable with it. Highly recommended for the people who are using free email services. See my article about how Zimbra is better than Outlook.
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Do you know if emClient is open source? I find that stuff like this that isn’t open source very often turns out to be spyware. Thanks.
Element Mail is a very good e-mail client that I use. Its also in active development, so it gets updates frequently.
Its even got the same face as Outlook 2007, which is a good thing, and im hoping they will add a calender function to it as well.
its at http://www.elementsoftware.co.uk/mail/
I don’t know if the opera download is the same as the web based email but it went to hell over the last few years. I eventually gave up on it… they’ve slowly decreased the amount of mail the inbox can hold, and the spam prevention didn’t work so well.
My old account fills up with unsolicited BS faster than I can delete it.
As much as I hate google and microsoft… gmail is easy to use, has plenty of capacity, and syncs with my phone… I found getting the free version of opera to do that was impossible
Thunderbird is the best I think. Even it supports Windows as well as Linux. Plus the more great feature of Mozilla Thunderbird is that it supports extensions and addons. One more great feature of Thunderbird is that we can now also install Calendar for Thunderbird, and also can integrate Google Calendar with Thunderbird. It also supports tabbing feature, which I think is not yet added in the Outlook yet.