XYplorer Beta Club

Since news came up of the beginning of the end of Thunderbird, I'd been looking for a new email client. I'm running the free Opera Mail (the standalone app) now.
recently I've discovered another slick app: Mailbird It's streamlined, and looks very modern.

Base on usability only (not take price into account):
Microsoft Outlook 2007 > Microsoft Outlook 2010 & 2013 > the Bat! > Thunderbird

.

2010:
- UI is much worse: bland color + a lot of waste screen space.
- Additional feature is more annoying than useful (social connector)
- no improvement on 2007's existing features
2013:
- UI is even much worse than 2010: it's optimized for touch screen thus waste a heck of screen space
- Additional feature is somewhat good (i.e: collapsing menu) but mostly for cosmetic only
- Again, no improvement on 2007's existing features

for me: Thunderbird (sooo many addons!)->Postbox (under observation)->Opera Mail->[all others]->outlook

I recall the Bat! once made news with kind of email tracking...*
I've got Outlook07 as part of Office07, but generally try keeping as many MS software off my pc as possible. When they aren't good, they are trash (this unsupported,that proprietary ...)

* a little browsing and my mistake, it wasn't theBat's fault, some mass-mailing tool spoofed it's UA.

Outlook has more add-on for sure. And you can write Outlook addons using VBA (not so intuitive, but workable and there're tons of forum support out there).

Feature wise, Outlook has a killing combo of email-contact-calendar which tightly link together. I work in a large company, which use soley Outlook which helps immensely in cooperation.

Advantages that Thunderbird and Mailbird have are:
- nice UI
- Start-up faster

P.S: Outlook has clear advantage in corporate environment. If i haven't work in such a corporate, I might consider the Bat! for its myriad of features

Been using Foxmail for years, version 7, the newest 7.5 is still too buggy.
It's got colored labels and a reminder function, and most important to me: it runs portable.
Don't be put off by the Chinese interface, there is an English language file that gets rid of it.

Mailbird is... I don't know... They are advertising it supports (after way over a year waiting for it)...

You wouldn't guess it.... Yes, POP3 support! Applause. Something only the best e-mail clients should have, really...

They need so much time to implement even basic features, it's incredible.

Unified inbox? Em, no... "Later"...

It may look nice but regarding features even Outlook 2003 is far beyond it.

I guess I take a deeper look at em Client.

Mailbird is in development, which might account for the above-the-fold mention of POP3 support.
I got interested in this because of the slick interface.

Our mail is hosted on google servers, and we use Thunderbird because its IMAP support seems to be very good. Last I checked, Outlook's IMAP support was not great.

I wasn't thrilled with the announcements about not much further development for Thunderbird, but so far it's the best I've found for what we need (and yes, there are many extensions that make it even better!)

Every time I've looked for alternatives, I keep coming back to Thunderbird. Even so, I still like to keep my eyes open for new things...

Mailbird is in development

Sure. For over 2 years now *g*

Sure. For over 2 years now *g*

In my defence, I didn't know that, I'd just discovered it!

Re Outlook, my workplace has Office 365 (or at least components of it?). I must say, I'm quite impressed by the Outlook 365 Web app. Way better than the last version they had. Both the email and calendar are highly usable. The OneDrive Pro (formerly "SkyDrive") app has potential, but I can't get the bloody thing to sync, so it's basically useless as is.

In term of features, got to admit that Postbox is the e-mail client suits my needs the most.

I can't afford to buy Outlook to comment much about it.

The base camp of Mailbird developer was near my home, now they have moved to someplace else. It was established by a small, cosmopolitan group. Mailbird has cool bulit-in Apps feature actually (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) but I guess this has caused the installation size grow larger than 100 MB. This size without common Unified Inbox and emoticon features? Nahh!
The Awesomium engine somewhat I found slow compared to the one Postbox uses. It takes longer to connect to server and check for incoming mails. Its proxy support still lame too. In short, despite being promising, I don't think it's ready for the real competition yet. How can it be proclaimed to be the best e-mail client for Windows, it is a mystery to me. Last time I checked, it hasn't even reached for stable release yet. Luckily, it seems to get support from community-based users.

After having dropped Thunderbird due to its vast amount of annoying bugs (especially when it comes to OpenPGP support via Enigmail), I've switched to The Bat! and never have looked back. Sylpheed (as a free alternative) is OK but ugly.

On UNIX systems I use Emacs with Gnus.