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 http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007074.html (and 1,000,000 in 10 days http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007119.html).

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 Although this statement has since been retracted, the Mozilla Suite will continue to be released as one application while Firefox and Thunderbird are alternatives, it has continued to grow.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 http://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php/Calendar:Lightning 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 Available through third-party plugins:

Thunderbird release history

colspan="3"|Key:
tyle="white-space:nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;" width="33%" align="center"|Old Version style="white-space:nowrap;background-color:#40CC40;" width="34%" align="center"|Current Version style="white-space:nowrap;background-color:#FFFF80;" width="33%" align="center"|Future Version
Release date Significant changes
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;"| 0.1 style="white-space: nowrap;"| July 28, 2003  
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;"| 0.2 style="white-space: nowrap;"| September 3, 2003  
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;"| 0.3 style="white-space: nowrap;"| October 15, 2003  
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;"| 0.4 style="white-space: nowrap;"| December 5, 2003  
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;"| 0.5 style="white-space: nowrap;"| February 9, 2004  
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;"| 0.6 style="white-space: nowrap;"| May 3, 2004 Pinstripe theme for Mac OS X, Windows installer, better junk mail handling, IMAP IDLE and LDAP version 3 support.
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;"| 0.7 style="white-space: nowrap;"| June 16, 2004 Smaller download size, improved IMAP support, updated extension and theme managers
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;"| 0.7.1 style="white-space: nowrap;"| June 28, 2004 Bugfix release.
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;"| 0.7.2 style="white-space: nowrap;"| July 8, 2004 Vulnerability patch (Windows only).
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;"| 0.7.3 style="white-space: nowrap;"| August 4, 2004 Vulnerability patch.
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;"| 0.8 style="white-space: nowrap;"| September 14, 2004 Improved Privacy Controls, Global Inbox, RSS/Atom Integration, Improved Data Migration, Improved Spell Checker Support.
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;"| 0.9 style="white-space: nowrap;"| November 3, 2004 More RSS Integration, Favorite Folders, Menu and Dialog Polish, Message List Groups, Virtual Folders.
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;"| 1.0 RC-1 style="white-space: nowrap;"| December 1, 2004 Bug fixing, improved theme, polish work.
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FF8080;"| 1.0 style="white-space: nowrap;"| December 7, 2004 Official Version 1.0 release.
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#40CC40;"| 1.0.2 1 style="white-space: nowrap;"| March 21, 2005 Stability and security improvements.
lign="center" colspan="3"| Upcoming releases
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FFFF80;"| 1.1 Developer Preview style="white-space: nowrap;"| End of March 2005 Non-Feature Complete Preview ("Alpha" in Old-Lingo).
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FFFF80;"| 1.1 Preview Release style="white-space: nowrap;"| May 2005 Feature Complete ("Beta" in Old-Lingo).
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FFFF80;"| 1.1 style="white-space: nowrap;"| Late June 2005 Finished 1.1 Release.
tyle="white-space: nowrap;background-color:#FFFF80;"| 2.0 style="white-space: nowrap;"| ?? 2005 Second major half of 2.0 development.
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 http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6247.

Security

As of March 14 2005, security site Secunia counts 1 unpatched security flaw http://secunia.com/product/4652/ for Mozilla Thunderbird 1.x.

See also

External links

 

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