Thunderbird as a replacement to Outlook

Hello All,

I have Office 2010 on our home PC. Yes, I know it is ancient but it works for my wife and I. I may upgrade to Office 2019 so I can get the latest Excel, Word and Powerpoint but I may use Thunderbird in place of Outlook. I am testing Thunderbird right now with a gmail account I have but I have not migrated our main email account over to Thunderbird. I need to figure out how to convert PST files to a format that Thunderbird can use. I see a bunch of web resources regarding the conversion so I will use them once I decide to fully migrate to Thunderbird.

What do you think of Thunderbird?
Any negatives or positives?
Do you have a better suggestion for an alternative to Outlook?

From my own experience, I like Thunderbird. I have been using it for a few days and I cannot think of one reason to stick with Outlook, plus, I really don't like having to pay an annual fee for Outlook 365.

Thanks, Bill

Hi Samuria,

Yes, I tried the direct import but it said:



I think its because I have Outlook installed on my D drive vs the C drive.

PSTWALKER has a program that converts PST to a format that TB understands. I will use the program once I figure out if PSTWALKER is legitimate. It seems to be.

Do you like Thunderbird?

I've used Thunderbird ever since the end of Outlook Express...at least 10 years.

No issues.

I ran it for probably 8 years without ever bothering to upgrade to a new version. Had no reason to upgrade.

Currently on 60.6.1, which I'd guess is rather long in the tooth, but again no issues and no reason to change.

Never used Outlook, so can't say if Outlook files can be easily imported. I know from experience that importing and exporting email was a major ordeal in the past, but I don't know if things have improved in the last few years.

If you are highly concerned with privacy, you might look at Proton mail.

bpatters69 said:

From my own experience, I like Thunderbird. I have been using it for a few days and I cannot think of one reason to stick with Outlook, plus, I really don't like having to pay an annual fee for Outlook 365.

Thanks, Bill

I use Thunderbird, version 78.10.1 (64-bit) and think it's great at what it does, email and calendar.

I'm not sure it is a direct replacement for Outlook, of which I have little experience, but would recommend it as a personal desktop email client.

I've used TB in the past and it always worked well, but the GUI left a bit to be desired (I found it rather busy). The good thing about TB is that it easily adapts to storing your "local folders" on Dropbox. What that means (at least to me) is that I can access all my local folders on my Windows laptop, then, while working on my iMac the same folders are available via Dropbox. So as far and all my local email storage, it stays the same no matter which platform I'm on.

Now, I did say I used TB in the past. "Past" being the operative word. I switched a few years back to an email client called Postbox. It's available for both the Windows and Apple platform, and, being based on TB, uses the same format for all local email storage, so you can go from TB to Postbox and back without any conversion needed whatsoever. You just point (in the settings of both programs) the client to the local email storage location and it's done. If you give it a try, you'll see that the Postbox folks did a great job cleaning up the GUI of TB. I find it very clean and efficient. And again (don't know if you're into any Apple products so this may not apply) the real beauty is that if I took a screenshot of Postbox on both platforms, you'd be hard pressed to say which is which.