While Thunderbird is developing, work is underway on Spicebird – a personal informant about everything in the world. The program is based on the Thunderbird engine, but due to the use of addons, it has a larger arsenal of functions than a simple email client.
What immediately catches the eye is a special home page on which informants are displayed about everything that the program can do. And despite the young beta version, she can do a lot already: she works with mail using POP and IMAP protocols, reads RSS, contains a calendar with tasks, works closely with contacts up to communication via IM, and most importantly, the program's capabilities can be expanded almost indefinitely through the use of Google gadgets. If almost every solid email client has the above functions now, then integration with gadgets is a unique opportunity that I have not met in third–party programs, without taking into account programs from Google itself. Agree, it's convenient to open a single program and see everything you need to see: new mail, news feeds, weather, currency rates, time, and tasks. Adding any Google gadget is very easy – just copy the link to the gadget from the catalog,
and the program will automatically pick it up.
The program can be downloaded both as an installation package and as an archive with a portable version.
Pruflink: http://www.spicebird.com
The only thing I could not launch was IM (this feature is called Chat in the program) – some errors appear all the time.