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

Responses: 122

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Have you been using the same trusty free Windows email program for years, or did you try a new one recently and fell in love?

What sparked your new enthusiasm, or what keeps you hooked on your long-time choice? Share Your Pick

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

I use multiple browsers, most support multiple homepages which are the varied research interests of mine, but for general and default use I choose an internet application with address book, IRC chat, browser, email and newsgroups, and composer (html), a descendant of Netscape, sibling of Thunderbird and Firefox, and suitable as only internet app or home office with the poetic name SeaMonkey. It has many extensions to extend its capabilities and for security; although it has some built in features that you can only get in Firefox and Thunderbird as extensions, e.g. a capable cookie manager. For home office the extension Lightning, calendar, makes it Outlight. Most offices don’t need Outlook. If I could only choose one, I’d choose SeaMonkey.
—saintsatinstain

I liked the simple functionality of Outlook Express. Pocomail offers the same and runs fine in W7x64. Tried Zimbra, Thunderbird, Pegasus & nothing tempts me to change.
—Guest Captain Scarlet

Firefox is an excellent browser. If you don't carefully save anything according to their instructions, a normal backup is useless. The same applies to Tbird! Since both are community supported, if you have a problem you post it to a forum. But since both applications are FREE, not much to argue about.
—kaypro11

I have used Eudora for the last 15+ years, and although Qualcomm dropped the paid mode it, the last 7.1 version is very functional and rock-solid. Great spam filter, lightening fast search option and highly configurable.
—Guest Suggarstalk

ZMware Zimbra is AMAZING. Within 10 minutes had all 5 of my email clients (work, school, you know how it is) up and running. That's 2 AIM names, Gmail, Yahoo, and a Microsoft Exchange address. Combined inbox and individual tabs, all clearly labelled, makes finding emails easy. I was a t-bird for a while, but — man! — am I glad I looked around!
—Guest freakish_neko

I've used Eudora right from the #3 version it has all I require, and more. The current is 7.1, there are a few items seem to be missing, but always used Sponsored mode. That may account for that, but I would recommend Eudora, not the OSE yet.
—Guest Bunderlog

These reviews from people are very helpful in my opinion — we can learn and benefit from the experience of others — i'm going to try Eudora — and will bring back an opinion after experiencing it. Currently, I've been using Outlook 2003… but it's never quite made me the happiest person on earth, like I want . LOL
—Guest Headlump