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Microsoft products are so common that most of us don’t think of alternates and believes that they are the one and only product made for this purpose. Specially if one talks about email client. The question comes do you really need one for personal use?

Most of the companies uses either MS Exchange or Lotus Notes both has their email clients but when it comes to personal use it is the web client. Emails like Gmail, Yahoo web client which are so good that we don’t feel the need of an email client? So Why am I looking for one?

I was interested to find an alternate for £300 MS office professional version. In my opinion some open source products are better then MS and I found OpenOffice to be one of them. Yes if you are used to MS office then you would find it different and take some time to get used to it. Which would be the case if you upgrade from 2003 to 2007 as well. So I installed OpenOffice and got rid of MS office 2007 trail version. After I did that I realised last week configured the Outlook to back up my emails as we are planning to move this site to another service provider. You must have guessed by now I don’t use outlook normally. Now I need to refer an email which is on my PST file and also need a email client to backup rest of the email.

Since I was so impressed with the OpenOffice I decided to find an open source free email client as well and the search begin with the requirement of A) Able to import my Outlook 2007 PST file & B) Should work with my POP3 Yahoo small business mail service. I first looked at

Windows Mail, as it it is part of Vista OS and more important it is free. Windows Mail is the next version of Outlook Express. Being another MS product you would expect it to be the obvious alternate that can use the PST file and POP3. BUT sadly it is not. You cannot import your PST to Windows Mail directly, you need to have Outlook 2007/2003 for that. If I have outlook 2007/2003 why would I use Windows Mail? Various forms suggested to use the 30 day evaluation copy for this. As I wanted to avoid that, I continued my search the next was..

Thunderbird, An excellent email client from Mozilla; an open source product. The first thing I checked on its review was weather it can import PST files and the answer was YES IT CAN. WOW!!! So I downloaded the software and installed, in-spite of critics crying about it not having a calender ans task… Who needs a calender for a personal email client anyway, until a year ago I was not using it even in office .I was very happy with the user interface and the time it took to install. When it came to importing the PST it prompted me to set-up and account first. It made sense as you cannot expect to simply attached the PST given that they are two different products. So I tried configuring my email account. While Thunderbird comes with the auto configure feature for conman email account like Gmail and Yahoo etc.. unfortunately it didn’t work for Yahoo small business service. Yahoo says contact Thunderbird and Thunderbird says contact Yahoo…. Such a shame!!!

The Next was Opera for which you need to take the browser as well; OK I wont mind another Browser in addition to Chrome, Mozilla, Netscape and IE. The review said It can import the PST and showed some screen shorts as well but after installing I found that it supports only Outlook express not the later versions like Outlook 2007.

Then there was Pegasus Mail, Eudora mail and couple of more which didn’t work for me. Then there was Zimbra. The Ajax interface and Mozilla core was an excellent product. Thou this didn’t work for me as it was a Beta version. The collaboration suite product was really good. It is more then an email client that is miles ahead of Outlook, It is some what in line with Lotus collaboration package but Open source. I think it will be very useful for a small company who doesn’t want to invest much for its IT.

I actually wanted to write more about these products but will have to end of the story for now. I am going to install MS office again and move the PST to Thunderbird which not how I wanted to conclude this

Rajani

Today I completed six years working for my current employer. I still remember my first day when I joined the company; it feels as if it was yesterday me sitting in the big reception hall of Hyderabad office waiting for my manager, and now it is already six years….. time simply fly

Rajani