Test Driving Linux

Thunderbird: A Feature-Rich Email Client

While Firefox is based upon the Gecko HTML rendering from the Mozilla project, Thunderbird is based upon Mozilla's email client code. Think of it more as an alternative to Outlook Express than as a replacement for Outlook. Thunderbird supports POP3 and IMAP clients, and beyond the typical email features it also provides a highly accurate statistical spam filter and a newsgroup reader. A statistical spam filter determines the likelihood of a particular message being spam, based upon you teaching it what you consider spam. After a few days of training, it should achieve an accuracy rate as high as 99 percent. Figure 12-6 shows the main configuration screen for Thunderbird's spam filter.

Figure 12-6. Thurnderbird's main junk mail configuration screen

Thunderbird also runs on Windows and Mac OS X, so you can try it out without switching to Linux. And you might consider doing so, because Thunderbird is more secure than Outlook Express, and also provides superior features such as the spam filter and an RSS news aggregator.

Make the Web come to you

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is just a method to have web sites tell you when they have been changed. When you subscribe to an RSS feed for a web site such as cnn.com, it will tell you when it has new stories without you having to visit. This can save a lot of time if you normally browse ...