Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is an open source E-mail client and RSS Reader. The project is very similar to Mozilla Firefox. It is presented as an alternative to other e-mail clients 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.http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007119.html

Mozilla Thunderbird was first named Minotaur, followed by 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 when the focus centered more on its functionality as an a-mail client. On July 26, 2007, Mozilla announced that Thunderbird was to be developed separately from Mozilla Firefox.

The current version of Mozilla Thunderbird, denominated version 3.0.4, features many functions, such as tabs for multiple e-mail management, enhanced message search, smart folders, 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 which accommodates most free e-mail services.http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/

On March 10, 2010, Mozilla announced via its website the release of a beta version of what will be the newest version of Thunderbird. Currently named Lanikai Beta 1, it has been made available for download to testers and developers curious in interacting with the new version.http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/about/press/archive/2010-03-10-01

Mozilla reports that this beta version was built on top of the Gecko 1.9.2 platform and that it provides for added improvement in memory usage and stability. It also includes design improvements and changes to the user interface. features such as the auto complete, activity manager and tabs have also been improved.http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/3.1b1/releasenotes/