Mozilla Thunderbird

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Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, cross-platform e-mail 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. On December 7, 2004, version 1.0 was released, and received over 500,000 downloads in its first three days of release (and 1,000,000 in 10 days).

Contents

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History

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Image:Mozilla Thunderbird logo history.png

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 Although this statement has since been retracted, the Mozilla Suite will continue to be released as one application while Firefox and Thunderbird are alternatives, it has continued to grow.

The original Thunderbird logo is just a modified Firebird logo: with a simple shifting of hue value from red to blue. In 2004, together with the change of Firefox's visual identity by Jon Hicks, a more professional logo that is currently in use was introduced in version 0.6.

On December 23, 2004, the Project Lightning was announced for tightly integrating calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird. Lightning is a project name, not a product name.

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Features

Thunderbird aims to be a simple e-mail, newsgroup and news feed client. It is not a personal information manager. Additional features, if needed, are often available via extensions.

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Message management

Thunderbird can manage multiple e-mail and newsgroup accounts and supports multiple identities within accounts. Features like quick search, saved search folders ("virtual folders"), advanced message filtering, message grouping, and labels can help manage and find messages. On Linux-based systems, system mail (movemail) accounts are supported.

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Junk filtering

Thunderbird incorporates a Bayesian spam filter, a whitelist based on the included Address Book, and can also understand classifications by the server-based filters such as SpamAssassin Template:Ref

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Extensions

Extensions allow the addition of new features such as OpenPGP through the installation of XPInstall (pronouced zippy-install) modules (Enigmail in this case). Thunderbird also supports a variety of themes for changing its appearance. Themes are simply packages of CSS and image files. Many themes can be downloaded from the Mozilla Update web site.

All extensions and themes available on the Mozilla Update site may be upgraded through the browser interface itself. Mozilla Update also allows users to update Thunderbird without browsing the Mozilla Foundation's website.

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Themes

Thunderbird allows you download and apply Themes to change the overall look and feel of the application.

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Standards support

Thunderbird supports POP and IMAP. It also supports LDAP address completion. Both reading and writing of HTML e-mails are supported. The built-in RSS/Atom reader can also be used as a simple news aggregator.

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Cross-platform support

Mozilla Thunderbird runs on a wide variety of platforms. Releases available on the primary distribution site support the following operating systems Template:Ref:

Since the source code is available, it can also be compiled and run on a variety of other architectures and operating systems. Thus, Thunderbird is also available for many other systems.

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Internationalization and localization

With contributors all over the world, the client is translated into at least 36 languages/locales, covering some of the least supported locales, such as Chichewa. Because of the use of DTD and property files for storing the string literals, part of the internationalization and localization job can be done easily by anyone without programming background, using simply a text editor.

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Security

Thunderbird provides enterprise and government grade security features such as S/MIME, digital signing, message encryption, support for certificates and security devices. Security protections include optionally disabling loading of remote images within messages and optionally disabling javascript which provides increased privacy and security.

With the addition of the Enigmail [1] extension, support for PGP signing, encryption, and decryption is also available.

As of December 2005, security site Secunia counted 1 unpatched security flaw for Mozilla Thunderbird 1.x.

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Market adoption

As of April 2005, the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (which includes both Harvard College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences) was making a customized version of Mozilla Thunderbird available to students and faculty. According to an article posted on May 9, 2005, New York University's Stern School of Business had also started using the open source e-mail client. Starting 2005 fall, the Networking Services and Information Technology department of University of Chicago will include both Firefox and Thunderbird in its connectivity package for all incoming students. More recently, Saint Louis University College of Arts & Science have adopted Thunderbird as their e-mail client of choice.

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Portable Versions of Thunderbird

John T. Haller has developed Portable Thunderbird as one of the major offsprings of the Thunderbird project. Portable Thunderbird is a mobile version of Thunderbird which allows you to carry your whole e-mail client and all your contacts with you on an iPod, USB flash drive, Zip drive, portable hard drive or any other portable media. You can plug it into any Windows computer and use it just like you would a locally-installed version. It retains nearly all of Thunderbird's functionality and includes a specialized launcher that allows extensions to be portable as well. It also uses UPX compression to reduce the overall footprint making Portable Thunderbird load quickly from a USB device. It is also available with GPG and Enigmail preconfigured for those that encrypt and sign their e-mail.

A spinoff product based on Portable Thunderbird called Mobility Email has also been released by Opendawn Ltd. It uses the Portable Thunderbird launcher and techniques with some enhancements by John Urbanek as a part of his Portable Thunderbird with Enigmail and GPG (PTEG) project. Mobility preloads several extensions to provide OpenPGP encryption and signing, access to Hotmail, Yahoo!, Lycos and MailDotCom e-mail accounts, and a simple way to quickly access the contact list.

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Criticisms

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Possible deficiencies

Mozilla Thunderbird lacks a number of features that are found in other e-mail clients:

  • The ability to save multiple messages to one file.
  • The ability to update (not just search) an LDAP address book, i.e. change, add or delete entries.
  • A built-in, user-friendly ability to back up and restore user data and settings. Currently an external application such as Mozbackup is typically used.
  • Support for fast full text search through entire message contents including message bodies, using an inverted index. (Thunderbird currently only indexes subject and sender fields, so searching through message bodies requires a complete and relatively slow scan of all messages.)
  • Built-in calendar feature (a calendar extension exists, but launches the calendar application in a new window; integrating calendar functionality into Thunderbird is the goal of the Lightning project).
  • The ability to synchronize messages and address book entries with a Pocket PC (the latter is provided by FinchSync, a third-party Java program)
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Footnotes

  1. Template:Note Thunderbird System Requirements. Mozilla.org.
  2. Template:Note Mozillazine Forums
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See also

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External links

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