Communication Tools

Mozilla Thunderbird is a free email, newsgroup and newsfeed client, developed by the same guys that created Firefox. It can handle multiple accounts for multiple identities and features an automated spam filter, message tagging and real-time spell checking, to name a few. You can even view your mails as a threaded conversation, so you never lose track of their context. Thunderbird is extensible through add-ons, such as the Lightning calendar add-on. If you're still using Microsoft Outlook, you should seriously consider switching to Thunderbird.

My second choices include Pegasus Mail and Foxmail. Foxmail is an excellent Chinese program with close to ten million users and an eager fanbase. An English translation is included.

Online chatting is one of those technologies that took the world by storm. Most people use either AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ or MSN Messenger, with each one using its own network. But none of these "usual suspects" enable you to communicate with someone on another network. So if you've got one friend on ICQ and another on MSN, you'd need to run both tools simultaneously. And what about AIM, IRC, Yahoo, SMS, IAX, Gadu-Gadu, Jabber or Netsend? The answer is a client that can handle multiple protocols.

One such multi-protocol messenger, Miranda IM, turns out to be a true gem. Open-source and capable of connecting to most (if not all) protocols/networks out there, it uses less memory than any of its competitors and is extremely fast and stable. A plugin system even allows you to extend its functionality to your heart's desire, ranging from extra protocols and skins to elaborate encryption libraries. Miranda is Windows software, though, so if you're looking for a decent unix/linux client, have a look at Pidgin.

It's hard to get Internet Telephony to "just work" on every PC without problems. Skype is pretty much the only program that's got almost everything right: It nearly always works out-of-the-box, uses encrypted communication and is kind of free. That's right, you'll have to pay for some advanced features. But since these tend to include connectivity to commercial telephone networks, a fee could be expected. For example, if you want to place/receive calls to/from regular phones or send SMS messages. Free features include Skype-to-Skype calls, video calls and conferencing.

If you're looking for an alternative to Skype, Google Talk and Gizmo Project make great candidates. But keep in mind Google Talk is still in development and doesn't allow calling cell- or regular phones. I'm keeping an eye on this one, though, since I have high expectations for future releases. Gizmo Project, another promising VOIP client, does offer landlines/cellphone connectivity and applies a Skype-like model: while charging similar fees for non-Gizmo connections, its free features allow Gizmo-to-Gizmo calls. But, unlike Skype, calling Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk or Windows Live users is also free. Gizmo Project is used by many universities, but can't beat Skype's ease of installation and use.

EGroupware is a enterprise ready groupware software for your network. It enables you to manage contacts, appointments, todos and many more for your whole business. It's essentially a groupware server. It comes with a native web-interface which allows access to your data from any platform all over the planet. Moreover you also have the choice to access the EGroupware server with your favorite groupware client (Kontact, Evolution, Outlook) and also with your mobile or PDA via SyncML. Over 25 languages are supported.

EGroupware is platform independent. The server runs on Linux, Mac, Windows and many more other operating systems. On the client side, all you need is a browser.

GNU Mailman is mailing list management software. It allows you to create and manage electronic mail mailing lists. It provides a web front-end for easy administration, both for list owners and list members. It supports digests (RFC 934 and RFC 1153), archiving, spam protection, bounce detection, Usenet gateways, and many more features.

• Through-the-web list creation and removal (with automatic support depending on the MTA)
• Multi-lingual support: list web pages and email notices can be in any of nearly two dozen supported language, configurable per-site, per-list, and per-user
• "Real name" support for members
• Much better password-less operation for simple user tasks.
• Support for personalized deliveries and VERP-like message delivery for foolproof bounce detection
• Emergency moderation
• MIME-based content filtering, with demime/stripmime like options
• Regular expression based topic filtering
• Better membership management, including searching
• Re-organized administrative requests pages
• Moderated newsgroup support
• A new architecture for the mail delivery subsystem, removing the dependence on cron, for better responsiveness and scalability
• New moderation and privacy controls
• Invitations
• Autoresponse governors
• Users can now change some of their delivery options globally, for all lists at a site, including their password, delivery status, real name, etc.
• Much better MIME and I18n support in the archiver
• A separate "list moderator" role has been added
• Urgent: header support (bypasses digests to reach all users immediately).

UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. If you provide computer support, you can quickly access your customer's computers from anywhere in the world and resolve helpdesk issues remotely! With addons like SingleClick your customers don't even have to pre-install software or execute complex procedures to get remote helpdesk support.