MOZILLA THUNDERBIRD

'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 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). As of 2007, Thunderbird has been downloaded more than 50 million times since 1.0 release.

Contents

History

Features

Message management

Junk filtering

Extensions

Themes

Standards support

Cross-platform support

Internationalization and localization

Security

Market adoption

Criticisms

See also

References

External links

History

Main articles: History of Mozilla Thunderbird

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. The original Mozilla Suite continues to be developed as SeaMonkey.
On December 23, 2004, the Project Lightning was announced for tightly integrating calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird, and is now available as an extension.
On October 11 2006, Qualcomm and the Mozilla Foundation announced that "future versions of Eudora will be based upon the same technology platform as the open source Mozilla Thunderbird email program." The project is code-named Penelope. An unofficial Eudora/Penelope forum is accessible via web or newsreader.
On July 26 2007, the Mozilla Foundation announced that Thunderbird would be developed by an independent organization, because the Mozilla Corporation (the for profit portion of Mozilla) is focusing on Mozilla Firefox development.^[1]

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.

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.

Junk filtering

Thunderbird incorporates a Bayesian spam filter, a whitelist based on the included address book, and can also understand classifications by server-based filters such as SpamAssassin^[2]

Extensions

Extensions allow the addition of features through the installation of XPInstall modules (known as "XPI" or "zippy" installation). One example is Enigmail, which uses OpenPGP for message encryption.[1]
Extensions and themes (below) available on the Mozilla Update site may be upgraded through the client.

Themes

Thunderbird supports a variety of themes for changing its overall look and feel. These packages of CSS and image files can be downloaded from Mozilla Add-ons.

Standards support

Thunderbird supports POP and IMAP. It also supports LDAP address completion. The built-in RSS/Atom reader can also be used as a simple news aggregator. Thunderbird supports the S/MIME standard and extensions like Enigmail add support for the OpenPGP standard.

Cross-platform support

Thunderbird runs on a wide variety of platforms. Releases available on the primary distribution site support the following operating systems:^[3]

★ Microsoft Windows, including 98, 98SE, Me, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Vista, and Server 2003

★ Mac OS X

★ Unix-based operating systems
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 unofficially also available for many other systems.

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.

Security

Thunderbird provides enterprise and government-grade security features such as SSL/TLS connections to IMAP and SMTP servers. It also offers native support for S/MIME secure email (digital signing and message encryption using certificates). Any of these security features can take advantage of smartcards with the installation of additional extensions. Other security features can be added though extensions. For instance, Enigmail offers PGP signing, encryption, and decryption.
Optional security protections also include disabling loading of remote images within messages, enabling only specific media types (sanitizer), and disabling JavaScript.

Market adoption

As of April 2005, the Harvard Faculty 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's College of Arts & Science has adopted Thunderbird as its e-mail client of choice. Also, the University of Leeds School of Computing uses Thunderbird as its main mail client for new students.

Criticisms

As with Firefox, the Mac OS X version suffers integration issues due to the use of deprecated Carbon widgets in the current version of Gecko. Support for Cocoa widgets will be introduced in Gecko 1.9.^[4]

See also

★ Mozilla Calendar Project (Discontinued)

★ Mozilla's Lightning Calendar Extension

★ IceDove, the Debian fork

★ Correo, a version using Cocoa for Mac OS X

★ List of news clients

★ Comparison of e-mail clients

References

1. Mozilla Gives Thunderbird E-Mail The Boot Thomas Claburn
2. Mozillazine Forums
3. Thunderbird System Requirements. ''Mozilla.org''.
4. http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mac:Cocoa_Widgets

External links

★ Mozilla Thunderbird homepage

★ Mozilla Thunderbird project page — For developers.

★ MozillaZine Forum for Thunderbird

★ Portable Thunderbird — A portable/USB drive-friendly version (not distributed by Mozilla)

★ Portable Thunderbird for Mac OS X (not distributed by Mozilla)

★ gibney.org has an article about saving multiple messages with Thunderbird

★ Unic0der: Importing Mozilla Thunderbird mails in Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express — Exporting mails from Thunderbird to Microsoft Outlook (Express)

★ Thunderbird Settings Backup/Restore — Backing up and Restoring the personalized settings for Thunderbird

★ Mozilla Thunderbird Resources