Download This: Tech That Won't Tie You Down

Thunderbird 2.0 Beta

If I can convince myself that I won't lose or mutilate a thumb drive by regularly carrying it around, I may start using this fine collection for my day-to-day needs. Until then, for maximum freedom I'll keep using free downloads that I can grab on a moment's notice--and quickly set up to ensure maximum portability.

For e-mail, for example, I use Mozilla's Thunderbird client and connect to my mail server via IMAP, an alternative to the POP connection most people use to get their e-mail. IMAP saves all your e-mail on the server. You can set POP to save mail on the server too, but with IMAP your sorted e-mail folders live on the server as well, so you'll get the same e-mail view from any computer. (POP can save only the unsorted messages.) For more on IMAP, see Scott Spanbauer's latest Internet Tips column.

And here's the latest on Thunderbird: The Mozilla foundation recently made a beta of the upcoming version 2 available for download. It's the first beta, intended for testers and early adopters. But if you don't mind putting up with a few bugs to get all the latest features, you can try it too. I didn't have any problems with my testing, but I always expect betas to crash and otherwise go bonkers every now and then.

Better E-mail Organization

The most interesting new feature in version 2 is probably the ability to add multiple message tags to any given e-mail. Tags replace the current version's preset labels (such as Important or To Do), which you apply by right-clicking a message. Labeled messages display in different colors, and you can apply filters to your view so that you see only messages with particular labels. Labels are highly useful for taming our increasingly unruly inboxes.

Tags are similar to labels, and the Thunderbird 2 beta ships with preset tags that match the current version's labels. But you can add multiple custom tags to any given message. I added a couple--"Trips" and "House"--to the default Important and To Do tags. When you create a new tag, you can choose from a range of display colors for the tag.

Besides adding the tagging features, the new version changes the app's look slightly and enhances mail alerts by adding the message's subject line and other info. Also, if you mouse over a folder, you get a pop-up window listing the unread messages in that folder.

One thing I'd like to see in Thunderbird (but don't expect in the near future) is better junk-mail filtering. Spammers seem to have figured out how to largely defeat the artificial-intelligence filters in Thunderbird and other apps, giving the edge to Web-mail filters that harness the collective intelligence of all its users as they manually mark messages as junk.

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