If you’re still using Outlook Express, you’re living in the dark ages. Upgrade to Thunderbird!

It’s Mozilla’s free email client. It’s updated regularly, detects spam nicely with its cool Bayesian filter, looks pretty (especially with all the extra skins you can download for it), and it much more versatile than other email clients because of the oodles of add-ons that are constantly being developed for it. Welcome to the beauty of open source.

Give it a try. It is, in my opinion, the best email client out there, free or not. Outlook does have more features, yes, but for the average user, Thunderbird does the job quite nicely.

The most important features, for me, as an average Joe emailer, are:

• spam control (Thunderbird kicks Outlook’s rearend here)
• organizational control (either client does fine)
• ability to read attachments (Outlook really screws things up in this category . . . my wife, who uses Outlook, has to send me emails in plain text format to avoid her attachments reverting to some really strange format that I can’t open)

One of my biggest disappointments is that Thunderbird doesn’t come with an integrated calendar. Outlook sort of destroys Thunderbird in this category. I’ve head that Lightning, an add-on for Thunderbird which adds calendar functionality to Thunderbird is pretty good, although I haven’t tried it myself.