Free Biz Ware

Email must be one of the most used application on any business computer today. And what better way to start introducing free software than with email program.

For years I resisted Outlook, choosing to stand by Pegasus Mail. Pegasus is showing sign of age. The development is slow and for a long time it was not able to handle Chinese.

I moved to Thunderbird when 0.8 came out. It was able to handle Chinese in UTF8 which was what I needed badly.

It wasn’t easy for me as well. Pegasus had been my email companion for almost 9 years before the switch. There are so many automated filters, identities, and preference that just works. If it’s not broken why fix it?

Thunderbird is useful if you download email to you local PC or notebook and read the email offline.

Thunderbird did not last long. Mail started to appear in my GMail folder in October 2005. After trying out briefly, all my incoming email are now handled by GMail.

GMail is great if you are constantly online. It takes care of spams at the server end which mean you do not need to download all the spam before you can filter it.

The resistance to switching email program is very high. First, there is a whole lot of email archive to transfer over. Then there is the learning curve, to re-acustomise to the many small daily activities that had built around an interface that had grown so familiar.

To ease the transition, if you have many accounts, one way (which I did) is to move a low volume account to the new email program. Try out the features and test out the functions. When comfortable, transfer the rest to make a complete switch.

If you are using Pegasus and want to switch to Thunderbird, read my migration guide.

If you want to move on to GMail, I suggest leaving the old email behind and start afresh. There no easy way to migrate mail into GMail. Despite the huge 2.5G mail space, it will still quickly fill up in future.

Thunderbird is at http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/

GMail is at http://mail.google.com/

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