Please recommend an email program that is free and secure. I would prefer to not use Microsoft Outlook. What are some good alternatives?
Here’s a good place to start.
Mozilla Thunderbird is excellent.
I second this in a most hearty way.
I’ll third that Thunderbird.
I personally love Pegasus Mail (pmail) - it has excellent security, a very powerful and customizable rules system, tons of grouping options and a whole bunch more, plus, like Thunderbird, it’s free! However, it might not be very non-techie friendly, but it could be (I’ve been using it for so long it’s like second nature, so I can’t give an objective assessment of its interface, and I can’t compare it to Thunderbird since I haven’t used TB - can anyone that has used both comment about the usability of the two for the non-tech?)
critter42
The added bonus of the Mozilla programs is that they’re designed with Outlook Express refugees in mind - almost everything is where you’d expect to find it on OE.
One tiny niggle with Thunderbird… if you have a large number of (POP3) e-mail accounts and want them all to be checked and managed by Thunderbird, you have to put up with a separate set of folders for each account… which can be a pain.
Unless there has been a new release which fixes this very recently, that is…
Naaah, go with Eudora.
Eudora sort of looks like something out of the 1980s, but that’s only because it IS. It’s a 20ish-year old email program in a very good way – it has an incredibly rich feature set with lots of power that’s evolved over time, and yet it’s still easy to use.
Eudora is all efficiency, not all flash.
Coming into it from one of the Outlook variants, you’ll feel like you’re stepping up, rather than stepping down .
(On the other hand, if you only have one email account that you access always from a single ISP or other connection-route to the internet, and therefore only need one SMTP / POP Server combo, and only intend on keeping and occasionally searching 2-3 years’ worth of emails, and find server-side or 3rd-party one-size-fits-all spam filters sufficient for dealing with your junk mail, you may not have the need or interest in Eudora’s power and one of the other solutions may be better suited for you, sure enough).
But if you wish, intend, or need to manage lots of different accounts, many of which need to be able to send or receive email from different POP or SMTP servers under different circumstances, and keep email in many different mailboxes as it accumulates in large quantities over many years, and be able to search it very quickly with a powerful and flexible search engine, Eudora is a very good tool for the job.
