Mail clients and security

[Charlie98]

With the demise of support for XP comes EOS for Office 2003 as well. I'm still using Outlook'03 across 3 computers right now and I understand I need to find a better solution.

I've downloaded Postbox Express and I think I've found my new mail client... :biggrin: ...but I wonder about security with open-source applications. Office has a big hacker bullseye on it because it's so widely used, I get that, but what about the open-source clients like Postbox and Thunderbird? ...are they subject to such problems?

Is there anything else I'm missing here?

 

[Chiefcrowe]

IMO they are also subject to security holes, etc. but probably not as big of a target since their user base is smaller and also the open source nature makes it easier and faster to fix problems.

 

[lxskllr]

Postbox is proprietary software. I've used Thunderbird since there was a Thunderbird, and it suits me. Like Chief said, all software has security holes and bugs. With FOSS, anyone can inspect the code, and find/fix bugs. With proprietary software, you need to rely on a single vendor, and most of the outsiders looking for holes have little intention of fixing them.

 

[code65536]

Scott MacGregor, the former lead developer and maintainer of Thunderbird, left Mozilla in 2007 to start Postbox. And Postbox is based on Thunderbird. This was largely due to Thunderbird being Mozilla's red-headed stepchild (though I guess in this case, it's really blue-headed 😛) that never saw much in the way of backing, financially or otherwise (one example are the changes made to Gecko for Firefox that would end up breaking something in the Thunderbird nightlies, and there wasn't much in the way of developer resources to keep up). And even today, Thunderbird gets just a tiny sliver of the development resources that Firefox gets.

He decided that going commercial was the only way to get the necessary resources to keep TB going properly, and that's what Postbox is, effectively: the commercial not-as-neglected version of Thunderbird.

Yes, Postbox is proprietary, but the differences between it and TB are largely in the UI (though those are also the differences that are most noticeable) and don't go very deep. At its core, Postbox is still TB.

(The plight of Thunderbird within Mozilla is a good example of when open source doesn't really work--when the project is unable to attract enough community and financial support; Firefox is paid for largely by Google paying Mozilla for the privilege of being the default search engine; Thunderbird doesn't have an agreement like this on its side, so it's dependent on community support, and there was never enough of that.)

 

[Charlie98]

I guess that makes sense... Postbox kind of reminded me of Thunderbird, just not as cluttered (at least Postbox Express, anyway.) Thank you for that...

 

[Muse]

I've used an old version of Forte Agent newsreader + email client, originally the free version and then I bought 1.93x and it's several incarnations advanced from that but I never bothered to "upgrade." It does most of what I care to do. I have it installed on all my machines except my server and the data separate (local). I leave stuff on my ISP's servers until I reach their limit, then purge. AFAIK, I've had no security issues with it. If one of my installations gets funky (a folder getting screwed up and I can't fix it), I can restore that folder from one of my other machines. It's quite easy to maintain.

 

[John Connor]

In my search for a new E-mail client rather than use bigot Mozilla's Thunderbird I found out that Thunderbird is supported by and evolved by the French Military.