SpiceBird: Email Client with Calendar, Chat, iGoogle for Netbooks

SpiceBird is a complete communication platform for netbooks. It provides e-mail, calendaring and instant messaging with intuitive integration and unlimited extensibility with intuitive user interface. It runs on Windows and Linux and can connect to any standards based email and calendar servers that support IMAP, POP, Caldav protocols.

SpiceBird comes in where Thunderbird falls short of the much-needed integration. Outlook integrates calendar, email and social networking (via plugins) all built-in into one interface. Evolution does the same for Linux, what Outlook does for Windows. SpiceBird is built on top of Mozilla Thunderbird so if you have used Thunderbird, you will feel at home. 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.

Download and install the app for both Windows and Linux using the download link provided at the end of the article. Once installed, run it and you will be greeted by a tabbed interface. An Agenda Applet lists your schedule for a specified duration. The RSS Feed applet lists the feeds on your favorite website. The tooltip for an item in the RSS applet displays the complete RSS article. If you click on an item opens the corresponding webpage in your favorite browser. The mail application is derived from Mozilla Thunderbird, thus it inherently provides functionality like grouping mails on various fields, threaded views, spam and phishing detection.

The calendar application is derived from Mozilla’s Lightning. It has all the expected features: multiple calendar subscription, web calendar subscription, day/week/month views, alarms etc. The address book card view gives you a quick look on the relevant information of your contacts. SpiceBird also provides inbuilt support for instant messaging using xmpp4moz. You can configure multiple jabber accounts too.