I've always stuck to Outlook, simply because I haven't tried anything else for ages and it comes with my version of Office. It works fine for my purposes but somewhat bloated for basic home use.

What does anyone else use/recommend and why?

I've been using T'bird at home. Have to use Outlook at work. T'bird is lean, mean, and has good spam filtering. Looks nice too.

--Steve

T-bird.

Simple, secure, open source, free, customizable, great spam filter, imports easily from Outlook and OE. It isn't the only one of the alternatives to do most of these things, obviously.

And I like the fact that unlike Outlook, it's just email, and nothing else.

I agree with the above.

At home, I switched to Outlook from Thunderbird after I bought a smartphone. Not my best move, but sensibel because my workplace uses MS software only.

I use Outlook, because it has my address book, calendar, etc.

I keep most of that stuff in my head, but it's good to write it down somewhere just in case. Paper gets lost too easily... lol

i like Eudora. it's polite, and talks to you in the first-person.
it awards rude messages a "chili" rating (on a scale of one to three chilis) and warns you if outgoing messages are the sort of filth "likely to get your keyboard washed out with soap". this is useless of course but it's fun to see how many chilis you can get without using any profanity (it will underline a mean sentence like "you don't have any friends").

i advise everyone against outlook and outlook express because of security holes, and at least in the past they haven't handled attachments in a secure way - have seen many people get infected with virii by using OE. infact many a virus is designed with OE security holes in mind..

I'd also recommend looking at mrpostman.sourceforge.net and portable thunderbird. This allows you to run off a usb thumbdrive (or in my case a usb 2.5" drive), with mrpostman consolidating access to multiple hotmail/yahoo accounts.

I try and stay away from MS-dependency as much as possible, but I have to admit Outlook 2003 is a fantastic app and give them credit where it's due. If you're running a decent AV+firewall and you're up-to-date with security patches (which you should be anyway if you're using any Windows-based platform) I doubt if it's significantly more vulnerable than anything else.

I've tried Thunderbird and it's nice as far as it goes, but it seems like a step back to the last century compared with Outlook. I'd like to make the switch at some point, but it needs more functionality, better filters, better rules, more configurable GUI, etc, etc... I'll give it another go in a year or so maybe, but it's Outlook for now.

I just installed Gentoo Linux on my quiet drive and hope to switch over to it pretty much permanently, so I'm in the market for a client. Right now it's either KMail or Thunderbird (KMail already installed)...

(Of course this is a Windows thread but TB works on both.)

I use Opera's M2 (Opera Mail officially I think)... I know, I'm weird.

i have been using T-bird.. but i think its still a little more 'bulky' than i would like.. (its not bad i know) also i'm not so sure about the junk mail filter.. recently the first email i have got from someone i know out of the blue (who there was no records of me emailing or on any list) got filtered as junk.. perhaps my expectations were too high? but if someone i have forgotten about in the future tries to contact me.. i have no certainty that it will reach me..

also, when i personally mark mail as junk, it doesn't mark it as read, or delete it, and when i mark as not junk it doesn't move stuff back into the inbox (are there settings for this?)

another thing, is there anything i can use to altert me of new email (such as eprompter) that will only alert me of email that is not filtered as junk??

Opera's m2 is the best by far! Opera is always open, and it's by far the best browser, so why not use the best mail client as well - right from within one's browser!

At home, I switched to Thunderbird because OE has too many security issues. I have to use Outlook at work though. If I have no choice and I must give my E-Mail address to a stranger or a website, I use my hotmail "trash" account for this purpose!

i just gave thunderbird a whirl but felt uncomfortable being detached from my outlook contacts book i regularly sync with my pda and my phone to make sure all my contacts are up to date, does thunderbird do that? if anyone knows how then please tell me. i have several hundred entries in there as well as dozens of entries in my outlook calendar... finding it really hard to see the point of moving to thunderbird (for me).

IIRC T-bird uses a Bayesian spam filter so you have to "train" it and it will get more accurate as time goes on and it learns to recognise what's valuable to you and what isn't.

I'm not a big fan of Bayesian filters...even when they're fully trained you can never be 100% sure they're not going to come up with false positives now and again, so you'll still always have to spend time checking your junk mail folder to make sure nothing essential has been mislabelled. It sort of defeats the whole object IMHO, although I know many people swear by them...

Thanks for your replies so far guys, the poll shows Thunderbird as a clear winner. However it doesn't seem to be getting the sort of mass coverage in the press as Firefox, and it doesn't seem to be such a simple choice to migrate from Outlook (compared to ditching IE for FF).

Outlook is a great program for office use - I much prefer it to Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise which are much clunkier and less intuitive. Much easier for setting up meetings, group mailings etc.

However for home use (<10 emails per day, no use for calendar or full address book etc) I find Outlook somewhat OTT. Plus it's a greater security risk.

So I think I'll give Thunderbird a go, it's free after all!

Keep the poll going, I'd like to see if Tbird stays ahead in the ratings!

funnily enough, one of my friends just had a big cry on msn because thunderbird crashed and a huge email he was typing was lost ...

i'd be very keen to switch over to thunderbird, if somehow it could use outlook's address book and retrieve/create entries directly from/into it as opposed to importing it into its own format. that way there'd be no problems with syncing and i wouldn't have to put up with outlook's very laggy url clicking.

There's an alternate to the organizer found in Outlook, and it's totally free... and it's compatible to all mozilla-based browsers including Thunderbird.

There's an extension that can be installed in Thunderbird and Firefox called "Calendar", which gives you a calendar and an organizer. There's also a standalone version called Sunbird. I never used any of them myself because I don't need such thing at home right now and we're stuck with Outlook at work. But if you need to manage your tasks and organize your meetings, and want to keep Thunderbird for safety, Calendar could be interesting.

More details about Calendar and Sunbird can be found on the Mozilla Calendar project page.