Berlin - 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 the Hanover-based c't magazine.

The old bulls of the client world are Microsoft's Outlook, the free Windows Live Mail successor to Outlook Express, and the free Thunderbird software from the Mozilla Foundation, which is also available for Linux and Apple users.

Windows Live Mail runs under Vista and Windows XP. It collects not only e-mail messages from Microsoft's E-mail Live service, bur can also work with the POP3 and IMAP protocols to link up with popular services such as Google-mail and Yahoo. A spam filter sorts out unwanted e-mail messages. A phishing filter is also in place to help guard against the theft of sensitive user data and passwords. Feeds in RSS and Atom formats are provided directly in the Live Mail inbox.

Thunderbird aims to make it easier to work with e-mail messages. Thunderbird 2 offers options for organizing and displaying folders, including favourite folders, last visited folders or folders with unread mail, the Mozilla Foundation reports. One practical feature is the preview function: move the mouse arrow over the respective folder symbol and a pop-up with an excerpt of the latest messages is shown, without having to leave the current folder. A notification popup for new messages includes sender, subject line and a snippet of the message text.

E-mail messages can be sorted in Thunderbird into more than just the standard "Business," "Personal" or "Important" colour tags. Tags can also be individually created and named. Thunderbird has also long provided support for RSS, newsgroups and IMAP support. That also applies for phishing and the self-learning spam filter.

"We recommend always using the built-in filter," Holger Bleich says.

One major advantage of Thunderbird is the client's expandability. This includes language dictionaries or free add-on modules like Enigmail to sign and encrypt e-mail messages and their attachments. One area where the program lags behind Outlook is synchronization with mobile devices - not least because many device makers only support Outlook. (dpa)