This Forbes article, Mozilla's Thunderbird Takes Off, is a good read. The money quote is "It's the best thing to happen to e-mail in a long time."
Posted by asa at February 7, 2005 09:22 AMJust wanted to share some good news, the University of Oslo (www.uio.no) have just selected Thunderbird as their new default e-mail client. They have used Eudora for years, but due to Eudoras poor IMAP-support (I haven't tried it myself), they were forced to look at other options after migrating all users to IMAP. That means potentially 50.000 new Thunderbird users!
Even though I'am working at the department making these decisions, I've so far had no luck convincing the people responsible for software distribution to dump IE for Firefox... sadly.
Posted by: Tomm on February 7, 2005 10:04 AMI always thought Gmail was the best thing to happen to email in a long time. I know I love the interface more than any other mail app I've ever used.
Posted by: David Schontzler on February 7, 2005 10:43 AMTomm:
I've posted your comment at:
http://gemal.dk/blog/2005/02/07/thunderbird_to_be_default_email_client_at_university_of_osl/
No problem Henrik.
I tried to check the number of actual installations this would lead to, and came up with approx. 10.000 installations. Of the 10.000, over 9000 is PCs running Windows where software is administered and updated through Tivoli (www.tivoli.uio.no).
BTW: They are also getting ready to install Nvu as the default HTML-editor over HoTMetaL. Thats crazy if you compare the maturity of Nvu with Firefox (which is not getting installed anytime soon).
The reason why they landed on Nvu is partly my fault. The fact that Nvu is free and that our CMS is WebDAV-based didn't hurt either :) (Nvu supports HTTP PUT which is good enough for us for the time being).
Posted by: Tomm on February 7, 2005 12:30 PMIf we could just have a Spread Thunderbird Blog like SFX. There is so much good news around and about TB not to be scattered www. So, why is no TB blog rolled out yet?
Anyone?
Thuderbird is a good alternative to Outlook Express. Unfortunately that's a low baseline; Outlook2003 wipes the floor with it. T-bird has too many shortcomings for serious use.
Scott Finnie summarises these well in his newsletter.
W.
Posted by: Wally on February 8, 2005 02:21 AMWally: I guess that depends on what kind of mail user you are. I personally like Thunderbird. It's by no means perfect, but it fits my needs pretty well.
Outlook2K3 might wipe the floor with it, I wouldn't know since I haven't tried it (it's not exactly a free download ;)). Outlook is a different kind of animal than Thunderbird is (at least currently). Outlook2K3 is a groupware client, whereas Thunderbird is only an email client. Therefore I would rather compare Thunderbird with OE which I certainly don't consider being better.
Posted by: Joergen Ramskov on February 8, 2005 05:14 AMTB has reached 3mill downloads. And yes, as an OE replacement its obvious that TB has a mission.
The first entry in this thread really points to something happening out there.
University of Oslo has chosen TB as the standard email client. Imagine the uplift when students really start to spread word by mouth in the community outside campus. Not to mention impacts the day they finish school and start asking about installing TB and FF in their job PC if not in place already.