Mozilla Thunderbird is a
free,
[6] open source,
cross-platform email,
news and
chat client developed by the
Mozilla Foundation.
The project strategy was modeled after
Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a
web browser.
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.
[7][8]
On July 6, 2012, Mozilla announced the company was dropping the
priority of Thunderbird development because the continuous effort to
extend Thunderbird's feature set was mostly fruitless. The new
development model is based on Mozilla offering only "Extended Support
Releases", which deliver security and maintenance updates, while
allowing community to take over the development of new features.
[9][10]
Features
Thunderbird is an email, newsgroup, news feed and chat (
XMPP,
IRC,
Twitter) client. The
vanilla version is not a
personal information manager, although the
Mozilla Lightning extension adds PIM functionality. Additional features, if needed, are often available via other
extensions.
Message management
Thunderbird can manage multiple email, newsgroup and news feed
accounts and supports multiple identities within accounts. Features like
quick search, saved search folders ("virtual folders"), advanced
message
filtering, message grouping, and labels help manage and find messages. On
Linux-based systems, system mail (
movemail)
accounts are supported. A still unsolved problem regards the
possibility to archive email messages on disk. When exporting a message,
by saving or dragging and dropping, the timestamp of the exported file
given by Thunderbird is that of the moment in which the file was
exported. For archiving reasons it would be necessary that exported file
had the timestamp corresponding to the moment in which it was sent or
received.
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.
[11]
Extensions and themes
Extensions allow the addition of features through the installation of
XPInstall
modules (known as "XPI" or "zippy" installation) via the add-ons
website which also features an update functionality to update the
extensions. An example of a popular extension is
Lightning, which adds calendar functionality to Thunderbird.
Thunderbird supports a variety of
themes for changing its overall look and feel. These packages of
CSS and
image files can be downloaded via the add-ons website at
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, extensions such as
Enigmail add support for the
OpenPGP standard.
List of supported IMAP extensions:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Supported_IMAP_extensions
File formats supported
- mbox – Unix mailbox format
- Mork – used for internal database
- SQLite – also used for internal database (since version 3)
Cross-platform support
Thunderbird runs on a wide variety of platforms. Releases available
on the primary distribution site support the following operating
systems:
[12]
The source code is freely available and can be compiled to be run on a variety of other architectures and operating systems.
Internationalization and localization
Thunderbird does not yet support SMTPUTF8 (
RFC 6531) or
Email Address Internationalization.
With contributors all over the world, the client is translated into
at least 52 languages, but client's addresses are currently limited to
ASCII local parts.
[16]
32/64-bit support
| Operating System |
32-bit support |
64-bit support |
| Windows |
Yes |
No |
| OS X |
Yes |
Yes |
| Linux |
Yes |
Yes |
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 through 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.
The
French military uses Thunderbird and contributes to its security features, which are claimed to match the requirements for
NATO's closed messaging system.
[17]
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 of Thunderbird, 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, 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,
Project Lightning was announced which tightly integrated
calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird, and which is now available as a downloadable 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."
[18] The project is code-named
Penelope.
In late 2006,
Debian rebranded Thunderbird as
Icedove due to trademark and copyright reasons. This was the second product to be rebranded.
[6][19]
On July 26, 2007, the
Mozilla Foundation announced that Thunderbird would be developed by an independent organization, because the
Mozilla Corporation (a subsidiary of the foundation) was focusing on Mozilla Firefox development.
[20]
On September 17, 2007, the
Mozilla Foundation
announced the funding of a new internet communications initiative with
Dr. David Ascher of ActiveState. The purpose of this initiative was "to
develop Internet communications software based on the Thunderbird
product, code and brand".
[21]
On February 19, 2008,
Mozilla Messaging
started operations as a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation
responsible for the development of email and similar communications. Its
initial focus was on the then upcoming version of Thunderbird 3. Alpha
Preview releases of Thunderbird 3 were codenamed "Shredder".
On April 4, 2011, Mozilla Messaging was merged into the Mozilla Labs group of the Mozilla Foundation.
[22]
On July 6, 2012, a confidential memo from Jb Piacentino, the
Thunderbird Managing Director at Mozilla, was leaked and published to
TechCrunch.
[23]
The memo indicated that Mozilla would be moving some of the team off
the project and further development of new features would be left up to
the community. The memo was slated for release on July 9, 2012. A
subsequent article by the Mozilla Foundation Chair,
Mitchell Baker, stated Mozilla's decision to transition Thunderbird to a new release and governance model.
[9][10]
Releases
Thunderbird development releases occur in three stages, called Beta,
Earlybird and Daily, which correspond to Firefox's Beta, Aurora and
Nightly stages. The release dates and
Gecko
versions are exactly the same as Firefox; for example, Firefox 7 and
Thunderbird 7 were both released on September 27, 2011, and were both
based on Gecko 7.0.
References
- ^ Release Notes, mozilla.org, May 14, 2013
- ^ "Firefox's addons are written in JavaScript". Rietta. Retrieved December 19, 2009.
- ^ "Firefox uses an "html.css" stylesheet for default rendering styles". David Walsh. Retrieved December 19, 2009.
- ^ "The Firefox addon, Stylish takes advantage of Firefox's CSS rendering to change the appearance of Firefox". userstyles.org. Retrieved December 19, 2009.
- ^ Mozilla Licensing Policies, mozilla.org, retrieved January 5, 2012
- ^ a b "Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarks". LWN.net. Retrieved September 18, 2010.
- ^ "thunderbird breaks half a million downloads in three days". Asa Dotzler's Blog. December 10, 2004. Retrieved February 9, 2013.
- ^ "thunderbird 1.0 reaches 1,000,000 downloads in just 10 days!". Asa Dotzler's Blog. December 18, 2004, 2004. Retrieved February 9, 2013.
- ^ a b "Thunderbird: Stability and Community Innovation". Mitchell's Blog. July 6, 2012. Retrieved August 18, 2012.
- ^ a b "Thunderbird/Proposal: New Release and Governance Model". MozillaWiki. Retrieved February 9, 2013.
- ^ "Mozillazine Forums". Forums.mozillazine.org. Retrieved June 18, 2009.
- ^ Thunderbird System Requirements. Mozillamessaging.com.
- ^ "mail/thunderbird". FreshPorts. Retrieved August 18, 2012.
- ^ WarpZilla
- ^ WarpZilla - Mozilla for OS/2
- ^ Download by language, retrieved on January 20, 2011
- ^ Marcel Michelson (December 10, 2009). "French Military Donated Code to Mozilla Thunderbird". Reuters. Retrieved April 24, 2011.
- ^ Qualcomm Press Release
- QUALCOMM Launches Project in Collaboration with Mozilla Foundation to
Develop Open Source Version of Eudora Email Program (October 11, 2006)
- ^ "Uses Mozilla Firefox trademark without permission - Debian Bug Tracker". Debian. Retrieved September 18, 2010.
- ^ Claburn, Thomas (July 27, 2007). "Mozilla Gives Thunderbird E-Mail The Boot". Internet section (InformationWeek). Retrieved July 31, 2007.
- ^ "Mozilla Launches Internet Mail and Communications Initiative". Mozilla.com. September 17, 2007. Retrieved June 18, 2009.
- ^ Paul, Ryan (April 5, 2011). "Thunderbird returns to nest as Mozilla Messaging rejoins Mozilla". Ars Technica. Retrieved April 5, 2011.
- ^ Sarah Perez (July 6, 2012). "So, That’s It For Thunderbird". TechCrunch. Retrieved August 18, 2012.
External links
