A free alternative to microsoft outlook?

[Moonshine]

I'm getting a new laptop for the house and i'm trying to avoid paying for microsoft licences wherever possible, so it i'll be going with firefox and openoffice for net and word / excel type programmes

Is there an free, good alternative to outlook? or do i have to buy a copy of this?

I would be looking for smtp/pop3 email compatability, maybe a calender and contacts management. It would be good if i could import my outlook data into it too.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Ta

Gerry

[markyc]

Moonshine, Big CraigD is your man for this This is his field of expertise :approve::approve: It's over to you Craigy boy

[Moonshine]

I found this link when looking for alternatives

http://microsoft.toddverbeek.com/mailnews.html

any reccomendations?

G

[euan]

Thunderbird.

Made by the same people who do firefox. I use it all the time and think it's fantastic.

[macblob]

I was going to suggest thunderbird aswell
http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/

[duncan]

If you've already got a copy of Office on your main PC, the licence lets you use it on your laptop, ISTR.

[The Dogfather]

Duncan is spot on but Outlook Express is also free if you wanna stick with Microshaft

[Gismo]

Outlook express is part of the windows install, so, assuming you have a Windows CD you should be able to add it, it's probably there anyway, look in programme files

[Moonshine]

ta everyone....

i think i'll give thunderbird a whirl and see how it goes.

ta

G

[Mark R]

A great open source equivelant to Microsoft Office is OpenOffice available at http://www.openoffice.org. I only use the spreadsheet part of it since I don't do much else that requires the rest, but it's worth giving a try since it'll cost you nothing to use.

Doesn't do the contact management stuff or e-mail but it has word processing, databases, spreadsheets and a few other things covered.