Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, cross-platform email and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a smaller and faster web browser. Just as Firefox aims to redefine the web browser, Thunderbird is a refinement of the mail and news interface. Users often use them both together. On December 7, 2004, version 1.0 was released, and received over 500,000 downloads in its first three days of release [1] (and 1,000,000 in 10 days [2]).

History

Originally launched as Minotaur shortly after Phoenix (the original name for Mozilla Firefox), the project failed to gain momentum. With the success of the latter, however, demand increased for a mail client to go with it, and the work on Minotaur was revived under the new name, and migrated to the new toolkit developed by the Firefox team.

Significant work on Thunderbird restarted with the announcement that from version 1.5 onwards, the main Mozilla suite would be designed around separate applications using this new toolkit. This contrasts with the previous all-in-one approach, and will hopefully lead to more efficient and maintainable code, as well as allowing users to mix and match the Mozilla applications with alternatives. Although this statement has since been retracted, the Mozilla Suite will continue to be released as one application while Firefox and Thunderbird are alternatives, it has continued to grow.

On December 23, 2004, the Project Lightning [3] was announced for tightly integrating calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird. Lightning is just a project name, but not a product name. A first general-user release is targeted for the middle of 2005.

Features

Features as of version 1.0 include:

Email:

• POP and IMAP
• HTML mail
• Multiple accounts
• Built-in, modifiable, manual Bayesian spam filter
• LDAP address completion
• S/MIME signing and encryption
• Certificate and security support

Interface:

• Heavily customizable interface
• New three-column view
• Customizable toolbar
• Customizable Mail Views
• Themes and Extensions
• Powerful sorting functions
• Message labeling
• Search tool
• Saved Search, aka virtual folders
• RSS and Atom reading

Newsgroups:

• Multiple accounts
• Detailed subscription manager
• Secure Socket Layering

Address book

• AOL Instant Messenger integration
• Extensive contact options
• Collected Addresses feature
• Custom lists

Available through third-party plugins:

• OpenPGP signature and encryption through Enigmail
• And more...

Thunderbird release history

Note (1): Version 1.0.1 was planned but not shipped due to delay and discovery of issues that needed fixing in all three of Mozilla Foundation's products [4].

Security

As of March 14 2005, security site Secunia counts 1 unpatched security flaw [5] for Mozilla Thunderbird 1.x.

See also

• List of email clients
• Comparison of email clients
• Mozilla Firefox
• Mozilla Calendar
• Enigmail
• Thunderbird-ko, personification of Thunderbird.

External links

• Mozilla Thunderbird homepage
• Mozilla Thunderbird project page (for developers)
• MozillaZine Forum for Thunderbird
• The Rumbling Edge - Weekly developments in Mozilla Thunderbird builds.
• Portable Thunderbird - An USB drive-friendly version.
• Jon Hicks describing the process of making Mozilla Thunderbird's logo