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October 2, 2007
Security: Thunderbird vs. Outlook
Security columnist Kenneth van Wyk compares the relative security of Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook and comes up with an endorsement for, well, anything but Outlook.
His scorecard:
| Outlook | Thunderbird et al | |
| Profile | F | B+ |
| Configurability | C | B |
| Usability | A- | C |
| Tilt | F | A+ |
His most ringing security endorsement is as it should be: for text clients like mutt, Pine, elm and others, which don’t do any of the stuff that gets mail clients in trouble: Displaying malicious HTML messages.
Another interesting entrant into the text mail client field, by the way: sup, which is based on Ruby and installed with nothing more challenging than sudo gem install sup.
It does IMAP, mbox over ssh and Maildir. It doesn’t do Gmail or any other POP3 server. That’s fine: POP3 is an abomination. It also includes tagging and a few other modern niceties that have appeared in assorted Mutt patches. And it supports speaking directly to your ISPs SMTP listener out of the box, which mutt has only recently decided to do after years of intransigent “Unix philosophy” dogmatism.
If I had to give a one-line summary for sup, it would have to be “It’s like Gmail, only it runs in a shell as a curses app and it does IMAP.”
It built fine on my Mac. At some point I’ll see how it does over on my Linux-based hosting provider. Thanks to Ed for pointing me at it.
Tags: mutt, outlook, security, thunderbird, e-mail
Posted by mhall at 7:20 PM | Add Comment
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