Take Thunderbird, mix liberally with calendaring, instant messaging, and release it on Linux and Windows. What do you get? Spicebird, a collaboration client that remixes Thunderbird to bring the creaking mail client up to date for today's users. Spicebird has been in the works for some time, but the 0.8 release is finally ready for a wider audience.

We have reviewed a number of free email clients before. You have tasks, calendar, email and social networking (via plugins) all built in into one interface and they all gel together. Evolution does that for Linux, but Thunderbird falls short of the much needed integration. This is where SpiceBird comes in.

"We are happy to announce the release of the beta version of Spicebird - Synovel's free and open source collaboration suite. It simplifies communication for users by providing integrated access to the various tools of collaboration, like email, calendaring and instant messaging, in a single application. It provides easy access to various web services while retaining all the advantages of a desktop application..."

Having a notification when new email arrives can be nice and really useful if you're waiting for an important message. But if you're using a desktop email client or maybe a third party webmail service, you might not want to run a big client application or have to keep checking that tab in Firefox to see if new mail has arrived.

gOS 3 Gadgets BETA instantly launches Google Gadgets for Linux on startup, introducing over 100,000 possible iGoogle and Google Gadgets to the desktop. Google Documents, Calendar, and Mail launch in Mozilla Prism windows to closer resemble desktop applications. The newest release of WINE 1.0 is included to now support thousands of Windows software for our advanced users.

Managing e-mail is made easy with the use of e-mail client, also known as e-mail reader. Some e-mail clients can also function as feed reader and can support plug-ins and themes. When it comes to picking the right e-mail client, Linux users have tons of choices. I have here a list of 8 of the best free and open source e-mail clients that are available for Linux.

The Evolution mail client has been the default such application in Ubuntu since I got to know of Linux. Sure it is the default GNOME mail/calendar application, but I really am of the view that Ubuntu needs to drop it in favor of say Mozilla's very brilliant Thunderbird.

There's been a lot of discussion about which open source application works best as a replacement for Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Outlook: Evolution, Ximian, Thunderbird, and so on. Let's add another contender to that list, shall we? Meet Spicebird, currently in beta 0.4 form.

An e-mail client, aka Mail User Agent (MUA), aka e-mail reader is a frontend computer program used to manage e-mail.