I've been using Live Mail 2012 for years (and Express before that). I saw a news article this morning stating that MS has dropped all support for the entire "Windows Essentials" suite of products, which includes Live Mail.
Does anyone have a suggestion as to a replacement? How about Mozilla Thunderbird?
exactly!
i swapped over a couple of months ago. i also auto forwarded all my live.com and other email accounts to gmail and simply opened gmail in thunderbird. this also means i can check post easily from anywhere simply going to gmail to check for new post.
of course you 'lose' actually being live from anywhere, but....
Well, I guess Thunderbird it is. I'll get it downloaded and see about getting my content migrated over.
Thanks :-)
I used Thunderbird for a good few years. I stopped at version 2.0.0.24 because I think that was the last one that supported my EMail Address Crawler 1.9.0 plugin.
Thunderbird was/is robust and straightforward but the biggest problem I had with it was the spam. I tried a couple of spam filter plugins for it but it was hard work. That situation might have improved.
A few years ago I switched over to Gmail and I would never switch back. Once I'd accepted just using search instead of arranging things in folders I found it made life easier. You can still apply labels to things to categorize them a bit, but I find myself doing this less and less and just relying on the search, which finds just about any email I want instantly. I like that I no longer have to decide which of many folders to file a message in. Also, the spam filtering is near-perfect. I get the occasional false positive but it's normally a mailshot and not anything serious. And you can train it to let those through by marking emails as not spam.
Gmail supports POP so I still have Thunderbird on my system and every now and then I open and download everything so I have a local copy of everything. But I almost never open this other than to find an email from before I was using Gmail. I did it recently after about a year and it still happily downloaded every email I had sent and received via Gmail in the last year.
ah nick you rash young man ;-)
too old to get my head around gmail's lack of folders and strange idiosyncratic labels and stuff. of course you're right that it does make life simple being so easily accessible, but you can't teach an old dog new tricks...
not having any problems with spam per se, though i did with live mail. you'd have thought m$ would have recognised the most obvious, but no, sexy sue wanted to visit me and shower me with rolex's whilst i bought viagra from obscure sources....
I switched to Thunderbird after MS made outlook online (Hotmail, ect) only semi compatable with the Live Mail client app (and I'm not looking back). MS thinks everyone will purchase Win 10 for full compatibility.
There is a (slight) learning curve with TB, but certainly worth the effort IMO. There is also a huge number of Add-ons available to facilitate functions and display to suit most everyone.
I have three email accounts which work fine in TB. Set up was relatively painless as TB (usually) chooses the correct server settings for you. I also have a gmail account and as was previously stated, you can't create folders directly in TB, but that's a minor inconvenience (at least for me) The additional Gmail sub-folders for Sent, Drafts, Spam and Trash are also minor, but that was the same using Gmail with Live Mail client.
However you can integrate your Google calender which supports bidirectional access. ('Lightning Calender' and 'Google Provider' add-ons