Spicebird 0.4 Beta Review: What Mozilla Thunderbird Should Be

Spicebird takes Mozilla Thunderbird and extends it into more of a Personal Information Manager (PIM) application. It is the creation of Synovel of Hyderabad, India. When completed, it will be in a better position to compete with Microsoft Outlook than Thunderbird could by itself. Spicebird intends to incorporate Instant Messaging, E-mail, Contacts, Shared Calendars, Tasks, Blogging and more. Spicebird is currently in beta version 0.4 with an update as version 0.7 expected any day.

Spicebird 0.4 can be downloaded for Windows or Linux from the Spicebird download site. We installed Spicebird 0.4 on Windows Vista. Spicebird is currently only available in 32bit. Setup is both simple and standard. Figures 1 through 4 show the primary steps. The EULA indicates it is a draft at version 0.1 and doesn’t have any surprises. It is even based on the Mozilla Thunderbird EULA. Of course, you can select the installation folder as well and placement of shortcuts on the quick launch, desktop and start menu. After installation, on first launch, Spicebird provides wizards for creating an e-mail account, news account or RSS feed.

Account setup using the Accounts Wizard [See Figure 5] for Spicebird mirrors that of its origin and inspiration, Thunderbird. User and Server configuration [See Figure 6] is done through this wizard and the new account is added to Account Settings, accessed through the Edit menu. Instant Messaging configuration is also an option after Spicebird is installed with a first run wizard [See Figure 7]. Figure 8 shows the configuration for a GTalk IM account.

In Account Settings, I wanted to configure the outbound SMTP server within the account, but I was not able to do so for accounts other than the default. I had to add the outbound SMTP

server in another setting prior to configuring the account and then selecting that outbound server when creating the new mail account.

Spicebird uses a tab view for different folder views, appearing much like some current browsers. The Main tab displays a portal with configurable applets, such as Date and Time, RSS Feeds, To-Do List, and Mail Folder content arranged in a three-column format. Spicebird.com indicates that iGoogle applets will be added as options here as well in the next beta. The Main interface provides immediate access to the most relevant information as organized by the user. Figure 9 shows an array of these applets. In Figure 9, you can also identify the different tabs used in Spicebird as follows:

• Main - Portal with different customizable applets
• Mail/News - E-mail (POP/IMAP) NNTP News, RSS Feeds, IM and GMail (POP)
• Contacts - Address books with either Card or List views
• Calendar - Calendar with Day, Week, Work Week, Month and Multi-week views
• Tasks - A To-Do list of Tasks and their status

When you click on an item in the portal, Spicebird automatically navigates to that item so you can read the entire item. If it is not a Spicebird object, it will open the item in the appropriate application, such as a web browser.