Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, 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 more than 500,000 downloads in its first three days of release, and 1,000,000 in 10 days.
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.
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.
Thunderbird can manage multiple email, newsgroup, and news feed accounts and supports multiple identities within accounts. Features such as 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 at which it was sent or received.
Extensions allow the addition of features through the installation of XPInstall modules (known as “XPI” or “zippy” installation) via the add-ons website that 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.
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. 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.
- License: Open Source
- OS: Windows
- Size: 23.28 MB.
- Publisher/Developer: Mozilla
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