So last night I decided to give Thunderbird a go. This is the email client from the same people. And I’m impressed. It comes with a newsgroup reader built in, and it has adaptive spam filtering.
It’s really easy to setup accounts etc. And it doesn’t have as many ‘features’ as outlook (which is a good thing, IMO)
I’ve been using Thunderbird for a few months and am very happy with it, with two exceptions. One is the little “you’ve got mail” pop-up is too brief - I guess there’s a way to adjust it by tinkering around the registry, which I’d rather not do. The other is the spam filter is just OK - after a few months of labeling things as junk or not the program still lets quite a bit through and assigns other valid e-mails (including a couple of whistle-related ones!) to the junk folder. Still beats Outlook Express though.
Using firefox on my laptop too, seems pretty good. I had to do some tweaking to get it to do what I wanted when I clicked on downloadable files, and it sometimes takes a bit to load up the program, but probably no longer than other browsers take.