Guide Note

Mozilla Thunderbird is an open source E-mail client and RSS Reader. The project is very similar to Mozilla Firefox and is modeled in the same way as an alternative to other web browsers and rss readers. The first release of Thunderbird was in 2003, which was version 1.0 and reached 1,000,000 downloads in its first 10 days of release.

Fast Facts

1. Latest Stable Release: 2.0.0.14
2. First Release: 2003
3. Developed by the Mozilla Foundation
4. Extensions available for download
5. Version 3 is currently in beta
6. Runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and many other Unix-based Operating Systems.
7. Is available in over 37 languages

Mozilla Thunderbird was first named Minotaur after the then-named Phoenix. However, this project failed to gain the enthusiasm of the general public and significant progress on the project didn't continue until later in version 1.5. On July 26, 2007, Mozilla announced that Thunderbird would be developed separately from Mozilla Firefox.

Like other software of this type, Mozilla Thunderbird features many great features such as a spam filter, junk e-mail settings, themes, and like Firefox, free extensions. All of the themes are freely downloadable and can be downloaded from the Thunderbird Add-ons page. The junk e-mail filter is based off of an address book "whitelist", which allows you to block individual senders and block certain e-mails from reaching your inbox. The current version of Thunderbird supports both the POP3 and IMAP standards, in addition to many other standards.