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Mozilla Thunderbird

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Mgillespie (talk | contribs) at 22:24, 1 December 2004 (New Screenshot showing latest 1.0 theme). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
File:Thunderbird10.jpg
A screenshot of a typical Mozilla Thunderbird session

Mozilla Thunderbird is a stand-alone email and news client spun off from the Mozilla project. The Thunderbird project aims to develop software that is smaller and faster than Mozilla while still being a fully cross-platform application based on the XUL user interface language. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a spinoff of Mozilla that aims to create a smaller and faster web browser. Just as Firefox aims to extract and improve the browser component of the Mozilla suite, Thunderbird is a refinement of the mail and news interface.

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 Although this statement has since been retracted, and the Mozilla Suite will continue to be released as one application while Firefox and Thunderbird are alternatives, it has continued to grow.

Features

Features as of version 0.7.3 include:

Email:

  • POP and IMAP
  • HTML mail
  • Multiple accounts
  • Built-in, modifiable, manual statistical 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
  • Powerful sorting functions
  • Message labelling
  • Powerful search tool
  • RSS and Atom reading

Newsgroups:

  • Multiple accounts
  • Detailed subscription manager
  • Secure Socket Layering

Address book

Available through third-party plugins:

Thunderbird release history

Version Release date Most important changes
0.1 July 28, 2003  
0.2 September 3, 2003  
0.3 October 15, 2003  
0.4 December 5, 2003  
0.5 February 9, 2004  
0.6 May 3, 2004 Pinstripe theme for Mac OS X, Windows installer, better junk mail handling, IMAP IDLE and LDAP version 3 support.
0.7 June 16, 2004 Smaller download size, improved IMAP support, updated extension and theme managers
0.7.1 June 28, 2004 Bugfix release.
0.7.2 July 8, 2004 Vulnerability patch (Windows only).
0.7.3 August 4, 2004 Vulnerability patch.
0.8 September 14, 2004 Improved Privacy Controls, Global Inbox, RSS/Atom Integration, Improved Data Migration, Improved Spell Checker Support.
0.9 November 3, 2004 More RSS Integration, Favorite Folders, Menu and Dialog Polish, Message List Groups, Virtual Folders.
Next expected releases / dates
1.0 mid December, 2004 Bug fixing, polish work.

Security

As of 13:50, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC), the security site Secunia.com counts zero security flaw not yet fixed for Mozilla Thunderbird, vs 2 security flaws unpatched (not yet fixed) for Microsoft Outlook, and zero security flaw not yet fixed for Ximian Evolution.

See also

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