Mozilla Corporation today released Thunderbird 2, its free, open source e-mail client for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems in 30 languages.
What's New in Thunderbird 2
- Message Tags: Create your own tags for organizing email. Messages can be assigned any number of tags. Tags can be combined with saved searches and mail views to make it easier to organize email.
- Visual Theme: Thunderbird 2's theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability and maximize screen real estate.
- Session History Navigation: Back and Forward buttons allow navigation through message history.
- Advanced Folder Views: Customize the folder pane to show favorite, unread or recent folders.
- Easy Access to Popular Web Mail Services: Gmail and .Mac users can access their accounts in Thunderbird by simply providing their user names and passwords.
- Improved Support For Extensions: Extensions can now add custom columns to the message list pane in addition to storing custom message data in the mail database.
- Improved New Mail Notification Alerts: New mail alerts include information such as the subject, sender and message preview text.
- Folder Summary Popups: Mouse over a folder with new messages to see a summary of the new messages in that folder.
- Saved Search Folder Performance: Search results for saved search folders are now cached, improving folder loading performance.
- Find As You Type: Finds and highlights message text as you type.
- Improved Filing Tools: Recent folder menu items for moving and copying messages to recently used folders. Move / Copy again functionality.
- Updates to the Extension System: The extension system has been updated to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions.
- New Windows installer: Based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, the new Windows installer resolves many long-standing issues.
- Windows Vista Support: Many enhancements and fixes for Windows Vista.
Thunderbird 2 also features message history navigation, similar in concept to the browser history feature in Firefox.
A new find-as-you-type feature winnows displayed messages on the fly, making searches faster. Thunderbird 2 also lets users save searches as folders. Re-executing that search becomes a matter of clicking on the saved search folder.
Thunderbird 2 can be easily extended with a variety of free add-ons that are available from Mozilla.org, such as AdBlock Plus and the Lightning calendar.
Thunderbird's main shortcoming at the moment is its lack of a stable Outlook-compatible calendar, a key to enterprise adoption. Mozilla is working on a calendar that works both without Thunderbird (Sunbird) and with it (Lightning), but it's not quite ready yet.
Thunderbird includes security features such as S/MIME, digital signing, message encryption, and support for certificates and security hardware. It also does not allow script execution by default.
Thunderbird supports POP and IMAP mail servers. Communication protocols like WebDAV or HTTPMail require a plug-in.