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byron

byron

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I know this posting shouldn't be here but I am hoping someone can salve my curiosity.
Long ago I dumped Outlook in favour of Thunderbird. In my T'bird leaves Outlook waay behind as an Email reader.
My question is... how can such a sophisticated program which is clearly more advanced than Microsoft's be provided free of charge? I mean what's in it for them as I cannot see them gaining any financial benefits?
 
Mystifies me as well,

But surely that applies to a lot of other products as well?

Some like Google get advertising revenue - some of which is transparent to the user. Perhaps T'bird make a living out of corporates.

I don't user Yahoo and isn't most of that free? That nice Mr. Gates (well, probably Mr. Balmer) thinks it's worth loads o' money.
 
Re: Mystifies me as well,

Seach engine profits are huge, as you say, these are transparent. Think of the millions of searches every second and the adverts appearing at around 4p a throw and you can see just how vast the income is. Add to that the click-thru income and the dosh involved is staggering.
 
From their website

Mozilla is not a traditional software company. We are a global community and public benefit organization dedicated to improving the Internet experience for people everywhere.

We work in the open through a highly disciplined, transparent and cooperative process to coordinate the development and marketing of Mozilla technologies and products as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Corporation has no outside shareholders. The Mozilla Foundation is a California non-profit corporation exempt from federal income tax under IRC 501(c)3.

This unique structure enables Mozilla to financially support and cultivate competitive, viable community innovation. The result is great products built by passionate people -- and better choices for everyone.
 
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they probably make money from the option to upgrade to a professional version !

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Nope! the version you download is a full copy same goes for their Browser which the latest Explorer has cribbed a lot. Their browser is called Firefox and works much faster than Explorer, uses less resources and as a matter of interest had tabbing years ago.
 
It free because thousands of software engineers give their time and skill to make something that they want to use - then they give it away. Companies sometimes help as well (by sponsoring engineers to work on the code). Part of Mozilla/Thunderbird was supported by AOL (after their netscape purchase).

Rick
 
I'd jump over to Thunderbird in a moment, except that I have a need to synchronise 2800 addresses, 2 yr worth of appointments, with my palm or phone, and 20 to 50 emails a day. Consequently my personal.pst folder is about a flakey 1.5Gb!

Eudora used to be the email client everyone swore by, what happened to that?
 
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I'd jump over to Thunderbird in a moment, except that I have a need to synchronise 2800 addresses, 2 yr worth of appointments, with my palm or phone, and 20 to 50 emails a day. Consequently my personal.pst folder is about a flakey 1.5Gb!

Eudora used to be the email client everyone swore by, what happened to that?

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Eudora is still running, I too used to use it years ago.

T'Bird it plucks your addresses from Outlook and puts them into its own address book.
 
Well I've just loaded ThunderBird onto my laptop, it took hours collecting all of my addresses from Outlook but it's finished and it is so much faster for searching and sorting, mucho impressed. I'm sadly tied to Outlook on the desktop tho.
 
Duta the need to regularly synchronise my PDA/phone for addresses and diary stuff which is then uploaded to Plaxo that then updates all the business and home puters so everyone knows what everyone else is doing, including family and kids which they still all studiously ignore! /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
 
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uploaded to Plaxo

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Isn't Plaxo considered to be bad news on a PC? It leaves your address book open to their spam or something
 
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Isn't Plaxo considered to be bad news on a PC? It leaves your address book open to their spam or something?

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I may get one email a month from Plaxo informing me of a birthday but that's all. I couldn't be without it.
 
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Isn't Plaxo considered to be bad news on a PC? It leaves your address book open to their spam or something?

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I may get one email a month from Plaxo informing me of a birthday but that's all. I couldn't be without it.

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But they have harvested your whole addess book.
 
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