Thunderbird: Way Beyond E-Mail

While postal services want to promote letter writing, the trend is clearly working against them. With a push of the button, an e-mail lands in the inbox of its recipient before a letter writer can even moisten the stamp. The tools of the trade are e-mail programs known as “clients.” They are used to manage correspondence on the computer, but nowadays they can often do far more. An estimated two-thirds of all computer users over the age of 14 have their own e-mail address. “Most people use standard e-mail programs from Microsoft or simply Thunderbird,” says Holger Bleich of c’t magazine.