I’m going to bet that you are familiar with Thunderbird in one if not more of its manifestations. Perhaps you drank it in college; it was an inexpensive high. I myself was a Lone Star beer or Paul Masson wine kind of guy. Maybe you encountered the Thunderbird in Native American mythology – the powerful bird whose flapping wings sounded like thunder. He was the protector of some tribes, the bringer of needed rains for others, and also the entity that brought forth destructive storms. The Thunderbird appears on totems, of course. Or maybe you have had one of those iconic Ford sports cars. The Thunderbird keeps showing up in various forms.
In my own case, the Thunderbird is an email client. It is an open-source project by Mozilla. Our son told me about it many years ago when he was a college student, but I was already an established user of Microsoft Outlook. I kept upgrading Outlook until 2007. I stopped upgrading because I hated the constantly changing menus of the Microsoft Office apps. When MS Office became cloud-based rental software, I became convinced that I no longer wanted to use any of their newer products.
Google Fiber has been our ISP for the last three years, and their email server is GMAIL. GMAIL was easy to set-up on our iPhones, and it played well with Outlook 2007 on my desktop. That is until recently. My version of Outlook is not as secure as more modern versions are. And Google recently notified me that as of this coming May, my Outlook client would no longer be allowed to access the GMAIL server. Time to find an alternative.
The simplest alternative was to simply access GMAIL from the browser, but I find that alternative less than appealing. Besides, I really prefer to have my emails on my own machine and leave the back-up on the GMAIL server. Enter Thunderbird. I downloaded the software a few days ago.
It was easy to install and connecting it to the GMAIL server was trivial. The rub is that there is no easy way to move my old Outlook folders to Thunderbird. I have emails going back to 2018, and once or twice a year, I need to refer to one of them. No matter, I have disconnected Outlook from the GMAIL server, but I can still see all of my old messages using Outlook itself. The last two years of email have been downloaded directly from the server to Thunderbird. So, I am ready to rock & roll.
Thunderbird has an intuitive interface with all the features that I use in Outlook. It has the ability to do PGP end-to-end encryption (I don’t use it yet); can transport enormous attachments; and has a reading and composing interface that is easy to use. I’ll become accustomed to it quickly, think.