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Mozilla Thunderbird

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Mozilla Thunderbird is a Free software, cross-platform e-mail client 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 45 million times since 1.0 release.

Contents

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. The original Mozilla Suite continues to be developed as SeaMonkey.

On December 23, 2004, the Lightning (software) 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 (e-mail client) 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.

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.

Extensions

Extension (Mozilla)s 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 skin (computing)(themes) for changing its overall look and feel. These packages of Cascading Style Sheets and digital image files can be downloaded from Mozilla Add-ons.

Standards support

Thunderbird supports POP and IMAP. It also supports Lightweight Directory Access Protocol address completion. The built-in RSS (file format)/Atom (standard) 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

Screenshot of Mozilla Thunderbird v2.0.0.0 running on Windows XP Classic
Screenshot of Mozilla Thunderbird v2.0.0.0 running on Windows XP Classic

Thunderbird runs on a wide variety of platforms. Releases available on the primary distribution site support the following operating systems:[1]

  • Microsoft Windows, including Windows 98, 98SE, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 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.

Criticisms

As with Firefox, the Mac OS X version is poorly integrated due to the use of deprecated Carbon (API) widgets in the current version of Gecko. Support for Cocoa (API) widgets will be introduced in Gecko 1.9.[2]

Some important features are also missing from Thunderbird, such as easy signature management or default templates for new mails and replies, which are present in most other email clients.

It is not possible to protect emails from other (unauthorized) users of the computer, even with a password: it only disables outsiders from downloading or sending new emails; already downloaded messages are available for viewing for anyone.[3]

External links

Retrieved from "http://wiki.edeskonline.com/Mozilla_Thunderbird"
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