Is Thunderbird the only decent Outlook alternative?

I know, but I have to know how to do this first. Not that many users separate data from system, most computers have only one harddisk and one partition with everything on it.
Average users have to learn something about partitioning and reorganize their data. Some users separate only the easy ones and do a backup of their emails with an email backup software. I've read all kinds of solutions at Wilders, from total separation to occassional separations + all these discussions about pros and cons. It's a personal decision and not really necessary and the rest are opinions.

 

My personal decision is to have one physical drive for OS and programs and one physical drive for data. moving the *.pst from C: to F: provides numerous benefits - restoration of C; without the loss of outlook data - faster restoration than if to a partition - Returnil without the need for a virtual drive..... feels better organized.

 

I have the same setup and never regret it. I can do whatever I want with my system partition. My data partition is still their with all my precious data.
Each time my system partition is corrupted, I don't even care, one restore and I have my access to my data back and I didn't lose anything, including the updates of today + my emails and email-address books.
In the past I had to backup my system + data daily, now I only have to backup my data daily and my system needs only a backup, when I changed it.

 

I'm sure I'm approaching the fringe of "Off-Topic" here, but here goes:

@Erik & Longview:

I have Documents & Settings backed up to an external drive daily. What's the difference / advantage of your set up?

...screamer

 

sylpheed is a great client for e-mail. It is fast, full-featured, and cross-platform, so it runs on windows, linux, bsd, etc. Also, it is able to integrate with gnupg out of the box, so that means you can encrypt your e-mails and sign them as well. I highly recommend it as a light-weight while still very feature-full product.

However, if you want to try something without a GUI, mutt is the way to go

Cheers,

Alphalutra1

 

I checked out Sylpheed and a few others. Downloaded Evolution but did not install it as I decided to try a few others first- the Evolution download was like 75 MB's and there were reports of it being slow. I downloaded and tried Pegasus. It seemed nice but also seemed to have a few bugs and their support forum had quite a number of issues posted. Plus the GUI and toolbar were not to my liking. Dowloaded and installed DreamMail which has a very rich GUI with a large number of features. But no spell checker and I also emailed an attachment to myself- from yahoo web mail to my dsl email account which DreamMail handled. Somehow the attachment was lost along the way? Beats me, but DreamMail had no attachment with my email.

So I decided to give Thunderbird a shot. Man am I glad I did. Not only did it contain all the features I was looking for but a few bonuses as well- including the ability to add the Lightning calendar. I threw on a few more add-ons: ad block plus, contacts sidebar, thunderbrowse. TBird 2 seems to run pretty light and is very tight and stable. I think this combo of lightning/tbird will be just what I am looking for.

For anyone interested, below is a link with plenty of Thunderbird 2 screenshots- like 37.

http://cybernetnews.com/2007/04/17/download-mozilla-thunderbird-2-and-view-our-screenshots/

 

Yech!!!!

 

I hope you'll like Thunderbird. I know I do! Just remember to make sure the auto folder compact routine is turned on (you may notice I upped the size on mine a bit. )

 

What do you guys do if you are using Thunderbird and have to write different types of email replies that ocntain various template messages, one to reply to sales, one to customer questions and son. Thanks. If Thunderbird would give good options on templates, I would be tempted to give it a try.

Gary

 

I saw this add-on although it is more of stationary than template-

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4394

You may want to check it out. I was going to try it but the notes made me think it could be a bit buggy for now although once refined a bit it could be real nice.

 

Thanks for the heads up.

 

Haven't tried that one. But I found another one more template related:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/640

Haven't tried that, either, though