Peter
Mozilla have announced the release of Thunderbird 2.0, the email companion to Firefox.
Today the email experience for millions of people gets even better. Mozilla's prize-winning Thunderbird email client celebrates the release of Thunderbird 2 today.New features. Improved security and privacy. Open Source. Available in more than 30 languages thanks to the efforts of our amazing localization communities. Personalizable. Customizable with extensions. Access to web mail services.
Thunderbird 2 has arrived. Try improving your email experience today!
The release notes list these new features for Thunderbird 2.0:
- 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.
I'm literally about to download this and give it a spin myself!
Thunderbird 2 is, of course, cross-platform and there are Windows, Linux and Mac OS X versions. It's a bit pot luck whether or not your Linux distribution will upgrade to Thunderbird 2, but if not, I'll be doing a tutorial on how to upgrade it yourself using the download from the site very shortly!
You can get the downloads from the Get Thunderbird site.
