Outlook 2007 v. Thunderbird

[Insomniac]

Wondering if anyone has experience with both and cares to share?

I used Outlook for a long time and liked it until I started getting a lot of SPAM at work. The junk mail "filters" were absolutely useless in Outlook 2003. They were updated monthly and seemed to have no learning capability. Mail that wasn't SPAM ended up being marked as junk. I honestly don't want to even double check stuff marked as junk. Outlook was no longer usable. It was either terrible junk mail catching or none at all, which meant I'd get a message every 2 minutes that was more than likely SPAM and would just be distracting. I switched to Thunderbird and the learning junk mail is awesome. Mail isn't nearly as tedious. When something slips by, I just hit "J". However, I miss the calendar part of Outlook. It also allowed me to store more information about my contacts (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.).

My main question is: Are the junk mail filters/controls useful in Outlook 2007? How do they compare to Thunderbird?

[Wabbit]

Outlook 2007 is buggy as hell. Wait for a service pack or two.

Thunderbird is nice, but does not have a lot of features that are available from Outlook. I don't get spam mail, so I don't know about filtering.

[RichK]

----edit----

crap, I thought I had Outlook '07 at work, but it's '03.
I'll just delete the three long paragraphs I wrote!

I use Thunderbird for mail, and Outlook '03 for a calendar.

[Sean Malone]

----edit----

crap, I thought I had Outlook '07 at work, but it's '03.
I'll just delete the three long paragraphs I wrote!

I use Thunderbird for mail, and Outlook '03 for a calendar.

If your company is like most it will be 2010 before they migrate to '07. :gomer:

Our Outlook admins handle the spam on the server side. I never get one spam email at work.

[RichK]

If your company is like most it will be 2010 before they migrate to '07. :gomer:

Our Outlook admins handle the spam on the server side. I never get one spam email at work.

Our admins handle it as well, but I think they've got it set to a low filter level, cuz stuff still gets through. When they originally had it at a higher level, we weren't getting a lot of important mail.

Time to switch to texting! :gomer:

[extramundane]

I use both Thunderbird and Outlook 2007- Thunderbird for personal email accounts and Outlook for work. I keep our network spam filter at work so tweaked that junk almost never makes it to inboxes in the first place. Anything that does get through almost never gets tagged as junk by Outlook, but I think that's due more to how well-crafted the junk mail is than Outlook's ability to handle junk. I've never seen an instance of Outlook 2007 tagging legit mails as junk.

Outlook is what it is- I'm not sure that even under the best circumstances it could truly handle being the primary junk mail filter. Sounds like your folks need to work on spam at the server level and hopefully kill a lot of it before it ever gets to you.

I run a couple of different websites (a community blog/discussion thing, and The Missus' dog training business) and Thunderbird has done quite well handling the myriad junk that rolls in off of those sites. It did have trouble at first, marking emails from a contact form as spam, but after getting that trained, it's been pretty much a breeze.

Dunno if that helps you at all...

[Insomniac]

I have a weird work situation. I'm a contractor and our team runs the same version of software as our client. Some of us are off site and some are on site. Those on site have their computers managed by the admin staff there. They do a wonderful job there. I was quite surprised they were moving to Office 2007 already. It must play better with the enterprise system they are setting up (and maybe with Exchange 2007 as well). My company on the other hand doesn't have the best admin staff, they aren't likely to spend any more money than necessary to add better SPAM filtering hardware or software. So, whatever Exchange/Outlook can catch is the best I will get (and that's the account that is hammered).

I'm off site, so I admin my own machine. Even though they will be setting up the machines to Save as Office 2003" by default, I'd prefer to run the same version of software. I think, for now I will be able to keep using Thunderbird, but my guess is once they move all the calendaring to Exchange, I'm going to have to switch to Outlook 2007. I'd rather not run 2 e-mail clients. Just hoping Microsoft copied Thunderbird and build some better junk mail capabilities.

[dando]

New Tbird project has been initiated.

http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9873385-39.html?tag=nefd.lede

:thumbup:

Mozilla == one of the few things AOL has done right in years. :irked:

-Kevin

[nrc]

I'm off site, so I admin my own machine. Even though they will be setting up the machines to Save as Office 2003" by default, ...

Yeah, that's what they said here, too. :irked: Either it wasn't set up right or it's not reliable. docx and xlsx files were soon flying everywhere.

[Insomniac]

New Tbird project has been initiated.

http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9873385-39.html?tag=nefd.lede

:thumbup:

Mozilla == one of the few things AOL has done right in years. :irked:

-Kevin

I saw that this morning as well. I think they've been working on it for a while, but someone finally decided to report on it. ;)

I like Thunderbird as an e-mail client. But it does leave things like an integrated calendar and better address book (it would be nice if you could add other fields, including dates that would integrate with the calendar).

[Insomniac]

Yeah, that's what they said here, too. :irked: Either it wasn't set up right or it's not reliable. docx and xlsx files were soon flying everywhere.

I do see a few docx and xlsx files getting e-mailed. I wondered if it was intentional or not though. I've noticed that in Excel for example, they changed all the default fill colors you can choose from for cells. The light red, yellow and green were popular colors (at least in all the workbooks I see). But now it's the regular red, yellow and green. It seems the green causes Excel to complain with the compatibility checker when you save as 97-2003. So I wondered if it was those kinds of things that made people decide to use the new format or if it is a glitch. Mine isn't set up that way, but I always pick 97-2003 for anything for work. If it is glitchy, probably would've been better to train people to use Office Button, Save As >.

[dando]

I saw that this morning as well. I think they've been working on it for a while, but someone finally decided to report on it. ;)


Prolly a media tour to demo the prototype/alpha version. Me thinks a beta version might be ready around June. :thumbup: I remember what it was lie when NS 8 was being birthed, but that was one ****ed up project. :saywhat: I try to repress those memories. :(

-Kevin

[Insomniac]

Prolly a media tour to demo the prototype/alpha version. Me thinks a beta version might be ready around June. :thumbup: I remember what it was lie when NS 8 was being birthed, but that was one ****ed up project. :saywhat: I try to repress those memories. :(

-Kevin

They've tried some wacky things, but I think we should all be glad for Gecko!