Mozilla puts Outlook in the firing line

Weeks after the successful launch of its Firefox browser, Mozilla released an email application in another salvo on Microsoft's home turf.

The Mozilla Foundation, an open-source development group founded by Netscape and spun off last year by Netscape's parent company Time Warner, on Wednesday published a release candidate of its Thunderbird 1.0 email management software.

Scott MacGregor, Thunderbird's lead engineer said that the release candidate - a substantially complete version of the final product posted for last-minute testing on the eve of the official release - "is a big step forward for giving users a safe email experience". "We think users will enjoy our adaptive spam filters in addition to new features like saved search folders and RSS integration."

Thunderbird 1.0 will fly into a marketplace with no shortage of competition - both proprietary and open source.

Microsoft is a deeply entrenched leader in email software. Its Outlook client application and Exchange backend software rule the enterprise market. Its Outlook Express is a popular free end-user application. Its free Hotmail email website, which boasts nearly 200 million accounts, has been a key driver of traffic to its revenue-producing MSN web portal.

In addition, some consumers have migrated entirely to web-based email sites like Microsoft's Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Google's Gmail. Those sites increasingly are trying to match the desktop applications' level of functionality. Toward this end, Yahoo in July acquired Oddpost.

Thunderbird offers some Exchange integration capabilities, and Mozilla said it has had some success with small businesses and universities. But Mozilla intends primarily to compete with the free, consumer-oriented Outlook Express.

If Thunderbird is to make any market inroads, analysts say, it will have to do what Mozilla's Firefox browser has succeeded in doing: capitalise on frustration with Microsoft's competing product.

"I don't know if the same dissatisfaction is there with Outlook, but we're looking at Outlook Express and we're seeing a lot of parallels with IE," MacGregor said. "There are the nuisances of the web, spyware slowing down your experience, spammers clogging your inbox, viruses in attachments... We think Thunderbird can help."

Outlook Express has been implicated in numerous security scenarios, often the same ones affecting IE and Outlook. But considering the level of frustration with IE, which has gone years without a feature upgrade and whose recent security makeover is available only for users of Windows XP, Thunderbird may have a tough act to follow.

"The most widely used, good-enough email choices are not great choices," said Peter O'Kelly, analyst with the Burton Group. "They're not leading edge in their capabilities and there's no guarantee that the security is going to be where you want it. But when was the last time you got excited about an email client? You probably don't wake up in the morning thinking, 'I need a better email user experience.'"

Whatever its reception in the market, the official release of Thunderbird 1.0 scheduled for 7 December will mark a significant milestone for a product that has long soldiered on in the shadow of its more famous browser sibling.

Thunderbird offers a laundry list of features commonly available in email applications, including support for the IMAP, LDAP and POP mail protocols and HTML mail; message labels, search and an address book; return receipts, message filtering, import functions, and a tool for managing multiple email and newsgroup accounts.

In addition, Mozilla hosts several dozen extensions to the application that perform tasks like changing the appearance of buttons, changing a sender's identifying information for single messages and compacting folders.

Paul Festa writes for CNET News.com.