FEATURES
A primary reason that people continue to turn to desktop e-mail programs like Outlook is because of built-in contact management and calendaring abilities. Outlook, in essence, is as much a contact manager as an e-mail program, and here’s where Spicebird takes direct aim at Outlook.
Spicebird has both a Contacts and a Calendar tab, and both offer features that will stand up well to those offered in Outlook. In Contacts, you can create address book entries on the fly, or you can import your existing contacts from Outlook, Eudora, or a text file. The same goes for the Calendar tab. Import your settings from Outlook, schedule appointments with others, and get a view of your schedule by the day, week, or month.
The e-mail part of Spicebird is full-featured and will be instantly familiar to Outlook users. The screen is organized in the same manner, with folders in a left-hand pane, message headers to the right, and the text of messages in a window below the headers. You can create folders for different types of e-mail messages; a filter function, similar to Outlook’s, allows you to route specific types of incoming messages to particular folders. An included spam filter works reasonably well.
While Spicebird offers discrete areas of the program for mail, contacts, calendaring, and tasks, these functions are, in fact, fairly tightly integrated, or at least aware of one another. For example, if you receive in e-mail message in which Spicebird detects an appointment or meeting, the program will provide a link that allows you to add the event to your calendar. Clicking the link will take you directly to your calendar tab.
Like Mozilla’s Firefox browser, Spicebird’s functionality and its look and feel can be enhanced beyond the basic package by downloading and installing plug-ins, extensions, and themes. Among the plug-ins included in the initial download are a Windows Media player and Acrobat reader; the single extension included in Spicebird is the instant messaging client. You can actually install other instant messaging clients, as well, including GTalk.
WHAT’S AHEAD
Synovel has some impressive plans for future functionality of Spicebird. Although the current version is still beta software — or pre 1.0 — Synovel plans to include tie-ins to blogging software even before the official 1.0 release. With this feature, you’ll be able to post to your blog simply by sending an e-mail message, and any comments posted to your blog will show up in Spicebird as replies to your e-mail message. You’ll also be able to store instant messaging sessions. The official 1.0 release is planned to have a Microsoft Exchange connector, as well, which should make Spicebird a viable replacement option for Outlook in business environments.
COMPATIBILITY AND AVAILABILITY
Currently Spicebird is compatible with Windows and Linux. The current version is Beta 0.4 but is quite stable, probably because several of the application’s core functions are based upon technology that has been in the open source community for some time and is fully tested. Download Spicebird from
www.spicebird.com/download.
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