The program maintains a search history so if you need to return to a search you ran earlier you can do so from a drop-down list. It includes a lightning-fast search-as-you-type that pulls up all matches to a word as soon as the characters you’ve typed are unique. One of Thunderbird 2’s strengths is its search facilities. New tag types can be added to personalise the way you structure your mail list.

You can then sort by tags to pull together all mails of a certain type. To help organise your incoming email, Thunderbird 2 provides a series of tags by default – Important, Work, Personal, To Do and Later – which you can use to mark each message. In our case we also had to re-enter our ISP account details. It does this quite well though it can take a while. If you’re switching from Outlook or Outlook Express, Thunderbird 2 offers to import your account settings, address book details and mail automatically. Although Outlook Express is less of a competitor for Thunderbird than Internet Explorer is for Firefox, there’s still inertia against switching from the software supplied by default.

Like its Web browser companion Firefox, Thunderbird 2 has to steal market share from software which is supplied free with Windows. Version 2, just out, has added several new features and improved on existing ones to strengthen its position. The leading open source offering, Mozilla’s Thunderbird, aims to shrug off the competition by being better organised and offering ease-of-use extras which can endear it to its owner. An email client, such as Outlook Express or Outlook, is the most crucial piece of software on any PC used for electronic correspondence.

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