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I Don’t Have Outlook, Is There a Similar Product I can Download?

The short answer is, Yes.

Listed below you’ll find a vari­ety of free Email clients avail­able for down­load. But be aware, not all mail providers allow you to use a mail client such as Out­look. Both Yahoo and Hot­mail require their users to upgrade to a paid ser­vice in order to access their Email via a mail client. How­ever, if you’re ISP pro­vid­eds you with an Email account, ie. pacbell.net, sbcglobal.net, att.com, comcast.net, etc., You’ll more than likely be able to access your Email using a mail client.

While Out­look isn’t our first choice in mail clients, in terms of per­sonal use. It will typ­i­cally be your first option, that is if your using a Win­dows com­puter. Out­look Express typ­i­cally comes bun­dled on the major­ity of pre-Vista Com­put­ers, those being XP, ME, 2000 98, and so on. And with the intro­duc­tion of Win­dows Vista your pre installed option is Win­dows Mail. There’s lit­tle dif­fer­ence between Win­dows Mail and Out­look Express, both being very lim­ited, and basic in terms of func­tion­al­ity. If you don’t have Win­dows mail, it can be down­loaded Here. The setup for both of these pro­grams is fairly sim­ple using the set­tings pro­vided by you’re ISP or Email provider.

These prod­ucts are “no frills” and are very much lack­ing in fea­tures and usabil­ity. For these rea­sons we would not rec­om­mend these pro­grams you’re first choice in Email clients. But they are def­i­nitely worth men­tion, see­ing as they are pre­ex­ist­ing on most computers.

If one of our clients hasn’t already setup Out­look Express or Win­dows Mail, we would def­i­nitely rec­om­mend one of the fol­low­ing products.

Mozilla Thun­der­bird is with­out a doubt our first choice in free mail clients. Thun­der­bird is a free prod­uct from the mak­ers of Fire­fox. If you know the Gurus, you’ll know that we have noth­ing but good things to say about Fire­fox. So need­less to say Thun­der­bird is also an amaz­ingly well built, extremely secure, and very well rounded mail client. Setup is pretty sim­ple, and is sim­i­lar to Out­look and other mail clients. Thun­der­bird also includes junk mail fil­ters, an RSS feed reader, and the abil­ity to search your mail. You def­i­nitely can’t go wrong with this product.

Opera has always been known to be a great web browser. They’ve also included the abil­ity to use their prod­uct as a mail client. Opera is an easy to use, respon­sive, and secure prod­uct, with many sim­i­lar­i­ties to Fire­fox. Its an open source prod­uct which is reg­u­larly updated, and is very well rounded and user friendly. You can read more about Operas Email capa­bil­i­ties Here.

Eudora is a prod­uct we’ve seen used in a few small law firms, bou­tiques, per­sonal users, as well as a few of our Mac lov­ing friends. It’s an open source prod­uct with few, if any, lim­i­ta­tions. So in our book it’s a great free product.

Mul­berry is a pow­er­ful, secure, and ver­sa­tile email client avail­able for most pop­u­lar plat­forms. The few places this prod­uct is lack­ing are, ease of use, speed, and the abil­ity to fil­ter spam. Not one of the great­est prod­ucts for the casual user, but a free mail client nun the less.

And lastly, Pega­sus. It doesn’t have the most intu­itive user inter­face, and its search fea­ture lagged a bit. But on a pos­i­tive note, it’s a very secure, and pri­vacy con­scious. But again, for casual users it may not be the best product.

Do you have a favorite mail client that we for­got to include? If so, let us know by leav­ing a com­ment below. Thanks for reading.