outlook or thunderbird

[themanwhowas]

i have recently defected to firefox after all of the hubbub that i have heard over internet explorers bugs and security holes. whats the score with outlook? same deal? i have tried them both and actually prefer outlook but if thunderbird is more secure then surely that would be the better choice.
thanks

[JPnyc]

Any program that's in greater use will be less secure. That's just the numbers of the situation. However if you do use TB, make sure you compress folders frequently, and back up your profile, because it's easily corrupted and you'll lose stored mail, otherwise.

[themanwhowas]

ya but with internet explorer the security issues are more to do with the coding than with the popularity. i was just wondering if anyone had any quibles with either program.

ps. never seen a jupiter web guy here before. groovy

[JPnyc]

There's no way to be sure of that until you have the same size thinktank attacking a program. Open source projects have good programmers, but there's no way they're any better than what MS can afford to hire, and since every program has bugs and holes, you can bet they're in the open source programs too. The proof only comes when you have 20 million programmers out there trying to find holes to exploit. There's no way a small team of programmers, no matter HOW good, can exhaust every possiblity like that number of them could.

[HAN]

I've been using T-Bird for a while and highly recommend it. But I am not much of an SMTP/POP3 emailer. A dozen a week is a big week for me. (Web based Hotmail or Gmail for me.)

JPnyc is giving good advice. Compressing the folders on T-Bird on a regular basis is a good idea. T-Bird 1.5 is in beta and it will offer the ability to store emails as separate files, which previous versions have not. This would make the corruption less of an issue. FWIW, I have never lost any emails.

Security-wise, I have no idea from a technical standpoint. From just casual following of the web and security issues, I don't see any users noting any issues relating to T-Bird.