Shoutbox

I felt like checking out thunderbird today due to the fact that i know have four email accounts... i downloaded it... looks nice but.... i can't do anything with it... it doesn't seem to support gmail nor hotmail.....

So my question is... what excatly do you use this for? I have one non-gmail/hotmail account but don't most people use these anyways?

Or is there some way to make them work and i'm just too n00bish?