Here in the Support Department, we are often asked if we recommend any particular email software. Our usual answer is that we have no program that we would recommend enthusiastically – and that really is the truth, it’s not a cop-out.

When it comes to email programs, the options really don’t amount to much more than slightly different ways of doing the same thing, and sometimes that slight difference is barely noticeable. I don’t do much in the way of integrating my email with calendars and databases and other sorts of what-have-ya, so really I could change back and forth between Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac Mail on a daily basis and probably not notice much difference at all.

This basic similarity between email programs is a good thing. It allows people to change programs with relative ease. For example, we talk to a lot of people who move from Windows to Mac and when they set up Mac Mail for the first time, it really doesn’t look unfamiliar to them at all – get mail, new mail, reply, delete…it’s all there and they adapt quite quickly.

I think that one of the main reasons that people ask us this question is that they are hoping that we will declare one of the email programs as the safest in terms of crashes. The sad truth is that they can all crash and they all do.  I have talked to folks over the years who have experienced catastrophic crashes in every major email program – email catastrophes do not discriminate! It’s true that I have probably seen more Outlook crashes, but let’s be fair, that’s probably because more people use Outlook than any other mail program. If I had to declare a particular enmity for any email program, it would probably be Microsoft Entourage, but I couldn’t back that up with any solid reasons – I’ve just had some bad experiences. I’m sure any of my coworkers could make a similar claim against any other program.

As for my email, I use Thunderbird on my computers and Mac Mail on my iPhone. I went with Thunderbird because I think the name sounds cool – that’s how I roll…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 12:43 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.