Outlook versus Thunderbird: Which is More Secure?

The usage of email is multiplying rapidly day by day. Many email clients are rapidly coming up to satisfy the growing needs. The choice of the email client by the user depends on two factors – Security and User friendliness. Therefore it becomes necessary to discuss and compare the security features provided by two email clients that are being used far and wide today - Microsoft outlook and Mozilla thunderbird.

Internet explorer and outlook (from Microsoft) are loved by corporate world for a big margin it has in terms of revenue, so do the hackers and phishers. According to my knowledge there is no other client as Outlook that has been badly attacked in the history. Outlook when used with default settings and configuration without any firewalls, anti-spam etc. is well insecure. The tight integration of outlook with windows is the reason behind most of the security vulnerabilities. On the other hand, Mozilla Thunderbird is an open source product and the brains of many open source coders work behind to fix problems and provide a Safe, Robust and Secure email client.

Mozilla Thunderbird uses Bayesian filtering for Junk mail filtering giving protection against Junk mails. The junk mail filter provided by outlook 2003 service pack 2 is improved to automatically evaluate any incoming message to see if it might be suspicious, potentially fraudulent, and part of a "phishing" scheme. It provides sanitization of junk mails by providing you an option to mark emails as junk.

During the testing of these two mail clients I found that Outlook is slower in filtering the spam mails as compared to Thunderbird. Outlook has the possibilities of getting hijacked and the resolving technique is also mentioned in the reference. (Reference: http://www.computing.net/answers/security/outlook-hijacked/15741.html). Thunderbird uses Gecko engine for HTML emails whereas Outlook uses IE engine. So Thunderbird has same security advantages as Firefox.