Readers Respond: Which Free Windows Email Program Do You Use?

Responses: 144

By Heinz Tschabitscher, About.com Guide

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(Continued from Page 1)

Thunderbird 7 is horrible I have used Thunderbird and the calendar add-on for several years, but the version 7 has not worked. My computer freezes up, the calendar no longer automatically updates from my Gmail calendar. Thunderbird may not be the worst program out there, but the programers of it seem to be striving to make it the worst one available.
—Guest Grandpere

Like most people I've tried almost every e mail program available. Over the years I've used IncrediMail most of the time. When it's good it's good but if ever you have a PC problem you can bet it's made by IncrediMail. Now I keep being told to upgrade and pay for the service. Be careful downloading, always use user options or you will get toll bars and all sorts of hard to remove rubbish. The best product is sadly only available for the Mac, stable looks good and so far after 3 years no problems. Needless to say I do as much mail work on my Mac.
—Guest expat_mike

If you don't mind sending out sentences like "i went to town,then i went home," then Thunderbird and Pegasus are for you - they see this as mistake free.
—Guest tomgu3

Thunderbird is a pain in the butt. If I had realized Windows 7 didn't include an e-mail program, I would never have bought it. Thunderbird lost a ton of my e-mail that contained lots of info that I was keeping for later reference. My screen blinked and everything in my inbox disappeared just like that! Gone forever evidently since I can't find it anywhere on my computer. I was furious. I left questions on the Thunderbird support site months ago, but no one has answered my questions. You get no help, no support and no e-mails. When I connect and ask for new messages, it tells me 9 times out of 10 that there are no messages to download even when there are messages to download. I hate it.
—getover

VMware's Zimbra Desktop is the best IMAP e-mail client I've used so far, and I only found out about it because of the comments section of this article!
—Guest Rayfo

It's probably not the best, but I've never had those problems described in these pages. Since a while, added Lightning, works also good. Have always been able to do approximately everything I wanted with it, and when I couldn't find a solution, I could find help within help forums here and there. One min-point: it looks pretty heavy for the processor sometimes, so better have a good one!
—Guest ed

Used Eudora. Loved it. Used ACT! Loved it. Using Outlook 2007. Don't like it. Is there a decent replacement out there that will interface with the calendar, etc., in Outlook? ACT! does but is far more than I need. Outlook is far LESS than I need. Sic.
—Guest Guest Murray

I intend to try Eudora because of all the seemingly excellent reviews from other people.
—Guest Warwick

My Yahoo was hacked twice and wiped out. [I] changed to Gmail but don't like spying. Need help!
—Guest bill

Used Outlook for 27 years. Back up regularly. Had a crash, first in 27 years. Outlook never worked again and I never got my email back. Tried Opera. An excellent browser. Goodbye IE. A perfectly good email program. Open-source Eudora too complicated for me. Nothing against MS. Just don't want to look forward to more hassle and expense. Could be right, could be wrong.
—Meaulnes

Feature-wise, I like Thunderbird, except for the "randomly shred my email" feature, and there seems no way to disable it. This routinely happens when email gets moved from IMAP folders to local folders. All the features in the world are useless if your email gets shredded all the time. At the on-line support group, there is some combination of denial that this problem exists, and a blame-the-user mentality. I am thinking about switching to Zimbra, which I have used before. I have had problems with Zimbra, but I cannot think of a single occasion where it corrupted or lost one of my emails.
—Guest Alex T

Don't waste your time with Thunderbird. I'll never get back the hours I spent on searching on the net why it doesn't work.
—Guest annoyed

After reading all the reviews (great posting everyone). I will further investigate Zimbra, eM mail, Pocomail, and Eudora. The "buggy" reviews for several others scare me. Good luck y'all on finding a mail client that tickles your fancy.
—Guest Marv

That's it, back to Eudora for me after two weeks of suffering Thunderbird. How can they manage to hide the in-box so effectively and not provide an option to stick it to the work bar. And what's with the addressing problem? With Eudora you just select TO. Only reason I tried something else was that after decades Eudora seemed to be a little unstable with Win 7. I'll have to work through it now.
—Guest Intercostaldrama

I've been using IncrediMail since Windows 98. It had its glitches from time to time, which corrected on a reinstall or upgrade, which automatically reconfigured everything to my previous settings, no uninstall necessary. However, over the past few months it would prompt an upgrade every time I opened the program and would not let me simply dismiss it. Then one day I inadvertently hit "Enter" before closing the prompt and it autoinstalled. Now every time I try to use one of the free features I've enjoyed for years, it tells me that is now part of the premium package and must be paid for. I feel I should at least be able to use what I've already downloaded, even if I can't add to. The one plus is that I was able to get directions from their "chat" to disable the link to Facebook! Other than that the "help" and the forum were about useless.
—Guest Gypsy