The Internet, once a place for the global exchange of information, has
become a dark domain rife with danger. From malicious Web sites to
phishing attempts at your accounts and passwords, you need to be on the
lookout for new vulnerabilities in the applications you use to go
online. The vast majority of e-mail has become spam, or junk, and many
of these messages contain hidden means of attacking your systems.
Fighting the ever-increasing deluge of spam e-mail requires a mail tool
built to take on today's harsh Internet. That's where Thunderbird, part
of the Mozilla project, fits in.
Thunderbird forms the e-mail portion of the split-up of the large
Mozilla suite. The better-known Firefox provides the Web browser
portion. Like Firefox, Thunderbird provides a simpler user interface
similar to the older Mozilla suite e-mail client, but easier to use.
Also like Firefox, Thunderbird is smaller and faster than its Mozilla
suite counterpart.
And, best of all Thunderbird provides an excellent junk mail filter. I
tested Thunderbird using an e-mail account that gets about one percent
real messages and 99 percent spam. Thunderbird's junk mail filter
suggests which messages are spam and quickly learns as you train it to
find more spam.
As Thunderbird downloads messages, it marks which messages it considers
spam. A simple click and Thunderbird deletes all the marked messages.
The accuracy with which it detects spam looks just great. The only
weakness I've seen is that Thunderbird has trouble identifying messages
with an empty subject line as spam.
Furthermore, Thunderbird won't run scripts in messages by default. These
scripts are the source of many hidden attacks. And, Thunderbird blocks
images from remote sites unless you tell Thunderbird to show the images.
This removes some of the major issues with malicious junk mail.
Available from the Mozilla project, Thunderbird costs nothing. As with all the Mozilla
applications, Thunderbird's source code is also available under an
open-source license. The program works well with more than one e-mail
account, and you can configure it to leave the e-mail messages on the
remote server. Thunderbird isn't unique in supporting these features, of
course.
What's best, though, is that Thunderbird is a truly cross-platform
application. Thunderbird runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and a host of
other operating systems. In addition, Thunderbird appears nearly the
same on all platforms. Thus, you can transfer your skills learned on one
platform, say Windows, to Thunderbird on Linux. The ability to run on
Windows, for example, proves very useful to those of us trying to
migrate away from Microsoft applications like Outlook, if only to
improve the security situation. I've grown to like Thunderbird,
especially when compared to Evolution, the default mail client on Linux.
Other useful Thunderbird feature includes the ability to install
plug-ins to extend the functionality of the e-mail program. Here's a list. This mirrors the ability of
Firefox. Also like Firefox, you can download and install themes, which
change the colors, icons, and fonts used by the application. See this site for a list of available
themes.
Thunderbird works well with the Firefox browser, using the browser to view Web links you click on.
You can find a plethora of reasons why you should switch to Thunderbird,
from the totally unbiased source of the Mozilla project. Even though this is a
marketing document, it covers points everyone should consider, such as
security.
