Emulate Microsoft email clients

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This article was written for Thunderbird but also applies to Mozilla Suite / SeaMonkey (though some menu sequences may differ).

Thunderbird has roughly the same functionality as Outlook Express, but the look and feel is different. It doesn't have native support for Microsoft Exchange servers (though it can use the optional POP/IMAP/SMTP mail servers) so its not direct competition with Outlook. There are a couple of things you can do to make Thunderbird look and act more like Outlook and Outlook Express, though you should ask why yourself why you switched if you want to mimic it too closely.

Look and feel

The Contacts sidebar extension displays the address books in a sidebar in the 3-pane-window of Thunderbird.

The Redmond revisited theme tries to emulate Outlook Express. The Outlook 2003 Blue TB, Outlook 2003 Green TB, and Outlook 2003 Silver TB themes try to emulate Outlook.

The Scroll To key extension lets you scroll to a message in the active folder by entering a letter or short strings.

The keyboard shortcuts are different. This article compares the keyboard shortcuts. There doesn't appear to be an extension to remap the keyboard similar to Outlook Express, but you can modify the shortcuts using the Keyconfig extension .

The Stationary extension attempts to mimic Outlook Express stationery. You can use templates from Outlook Express.

Calendar and contacts

This article explains how to use Outlook and Outlook Express contacts with Thunderbird, rather than importing them and using Thunderbird's address books.

The Lightning extension provides integrated calendar support for Thunderbird. However there are issues with how you respond to Outlook meeting/calendar requests. With earlier versions of Lightning you could configure Outlook as a calendar "helper app" for Thunderbird. [1] Thats not possible with version 0.7, and the "Send attendees invitations via email" is grayed out. [2] Hopefully this will improve in the next version.

Multiple identities

Thunderbird has multiple identity support, but its fundamentally different from what Outlook Express provides. Frequently this is an issue when somebody has secondary accounts and is used to using File -> Switch Identities to switch to a different account. See this article for how to use secondary accounts.

.EML files

Thunderbird has limited built-in support for .eml files. It doesn't support dragging and dropping them like in Outlook Express. The ImportExportTools extension provides support for importing and exporting .eml files.

Interoperability

Outlook supports RFC2047 for attachment filename handling while Thunderbird supports RFC2231, the newer standard. This can cause file attachments sent from Thunderbird to be renamed if they're longer than 64 bytes. See this article for how to prevent that.

Thunderbird doesn't support OWA because it requires WebDAV support, and Thunderbird only supports fetching mail using POP3 and IMAP. This article mentions several extensions that provide OWA support but many users have problems getting them to work.

Thunderbird supports Simple MAPI but its buggy.

Thunderbird doesn't have native support for the Microsoft Exchange server. It will work with the optional POP3, IMAP and SMTP servers if the admin installs them.

See also

External links