E-Mail Programs Still Don't Deliver

Thunderbird's junk-mail detector learns from you; each time you mark a message as junk (or undo Thunderbird's incorrect marking), its recognition improves a little. It now also scans for phishing messages, those scams purporting to be from banks or credit-card issuers. Suspect messages get an unmistakable warning, followed by a second alert if you click their phony "log into your account" links.

When a virus lands in your inbox, however, Thunderbird doesn't take advantage of the option in Windows XP's Service Pack 2 update that deactivates programs lurking in attached files.

Beyond e-mail, Thunderbird can also read Usenet newsgroups (online forums now ignored by most users) and subscribe to the newsfeeds many Web sites publish. But adding newsfeeds requires a clumsy copy-and-paste dance instead of clicking on links in your browser.

I'd gladly swap Usenet and newsfeed capabilities for a decent address book. Its excuse for one can store only two e-mail addresses per person, makes editing the contact information as awkward as possible, offers no built-in way to share its contents with other software or hardware devices, such as a handheld organizer, and can't even open or save contacts in the standard vCard format.

I've relied on Thunderbird in Windows for e-mail for most of the last two years, but I've given up on its address book. Instead, I let its auto-complete feature remember addresses I use most often and keep my real contacts list in Mac OS X's Address Book, which integrates perfectly with OS X's Mail and can sync to my Treo 650 phone as well.

There's an enormous opportunity for Thunderbird's developers here to jump past the likes of Outlook Express or Outlook. For example, why can't an address book track whom I'm overdue to send a note to? Why can't it let me update street addresses for family members all at once? Why can't it share the same contacts list across multiple computers -- one of the unmatched benefits of Web mail?

Some of these missing features can be filled in with the impressive variety of downloadable Thunderbird extensions. But a program aspiring to make e-mail work for the masses shouldn't come with so much assembly required; long-suffering Windows mail users deserve a little better than that.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrob@twp.com.