Ars Technica reviews Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0. Although I’m a very happy Firefox user, I’m still sitting on the fence with regards to Thunderbird: email is a critical app for me and I’m running well with Entourage.

It certainly ain’t broke (until the DB dies on me again), and I’m not sure I want to fix it.

An email client is not like a browser where I can easily switch between Safari, Camino, Firefox or even OmniWeb and, surprisingly infrequently, Internet Explorer: my email universe is only partially in IMAP and I have quite a large offline storage archive. In comparison, my bookmark list is tiny (that function was mostly transferred over to my news reader) and just a bunch of useful links, or tentative reading list, that don’t need to be synched together; even the plugins are installed once for all browsers. Additionally, although I don’t use Entourage’s integration with Office much, I do use quite a few Applescripts, support for which seems to be absent from Thunderbird. Address book import is also an issue: Entourage has a rather rich set of fields and any import process would have to be checked by hand.

Conclusion: email clients are a segment where the switching friction is larger than for browsers.

It does look like an excellent piece of software though and I view switching as an inevitable event in the long term, along with the retirement of any POP-only account and throwaway Hotmail addresses.

[Thanks to Pseudo for the reminder]