Well, I bit the bullet and finally switched from Outlook to Thunderbird.

The installation was quick, and it offered to convert all of my data from Outlook to Thunderbird for me. And then it did. It just worked. It reproduced all of my folders, copied in all of my contacts and everything else. It did not convert my rules, but that is OK. I needed to re-work those anyway.

Thunderbird's built-in spam/junk filters are truly awesome. I have had only 6 false positives since switching, and those were all from one source that I somehow marked as junk - so they weren't Thunderbird's fault. :)

After the conversion, I did end up moving all of my messages out of the copied "Personal Folder" section and into a more rational folder structure - my old one was out-dated. Thunderbird also imported my archive.pst file, since I had it open in Outlook, and I ended up putting all the archived stuff back into the live file structure.

In Outlook, the two PST files were a total of 90mb, but under Thunderbird the combined total is only around 30mb. Nice!

Anyway, I got in the 933 system I bought for a friend as a replacement for their dead system, and since they were using a separate IDE controller, it worked beautifully when I transplanted the old controller and drives into the new system! I updated everything, and I'm converting her to Thunderbird and Firefox to get her off of Outlook Express and MSIE. Far safer this way!