Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free,[10] 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.[11][12]
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 the community to take over the development of new features.[13][14]
On November 25, 2014, Kent James of the Mozilla Foundation announced that more staff are required to be working full-time on Thunderbird so that the Foundation can release a stable and reliable product and make progress on features that have been frequently requested by the community. They have also set up a roadmap for the next major release, Thunderbird 38 due in May 2015.
Features[edit]
Thunderbird is an email, newsgroup, news feed, and chat (XMPP, IRC, Twitter) client. The vanilla version is not a personal information manager, although theMozilla Lightning extension adds PIM functionality. Additional features, if needed, are often available via other extensions. Message management[edit]
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. Junk filtering[edit]
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.[16] Extensions and themes[edit] 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. Standards support[edit]
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[edit]
Thunderbird provides mailbox format support using plugins, but this feature is not yet enabled due to related work in progress.[17] The mailbox formats supported as of July 2014 are:
mbox – Unix mailbox format (one file holding many emails) maildir - known as maildir-lite (one file per email). Note: not yet stable, as of July 2014 Mozilla advise this format is still "too buggy for normal use"[18]
Thunderbird also uses Mork and (since version 3) MozStorage (which is based on SQLite) for its internal database. Mork was due to be replaced with MozStorage in Thunderbird 3.0.,[19] but the 8.0 release still uses the Mork file format. The current version of SeaMonkey, version 2.14.1, also still uses Mork for its indexes for both POP and IMAP mail folders (at least). Limits and known issues[edit]
The default mailbox format ("mbox") back-end allows a mailbox up to very large sizes (64 bit or file system limit). However if used in Local Folder mode, as is the case for POP3 email storage and other offline email stores, it has a usable limit of 4GB, with data corruption possible if this size is exceeded,[18] although Thunderbird tries to detect and prevent this. The limit was being actively worked on by developers in 2013 and remains open; it does not affect IMAP mail storage.[18] Compaction of near-4GB mailboxes is also potentially "very slow".[18]
An issue also exists related to overly-long filenames in some cases, since Thunderbird must rely on the local computer for filing system limitations, while external email (IMAP especially) can have nested email folders with arbitrary length paths and filenames that cannot be stored under their intended paths and names.[18] Cross-platform support[edit]
Thunderbird runs on a variety of platforms. Releases available on the primary distribution site support the following operating systems:[20][21]
Linux Windows OS X
Unofficial ports are available for:
FreeBSD[22] OpenBSD[23] OpenSolaris OS/2 and eComStation[24][25]
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[edit]
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 53 languages, but client's addresses are currently limited to ASCII local parts.[26] Security[edit]
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 messageencryption using certificates). Any of these security features can take advantage of smartcards with the installation of additional extensions.
Other security features may 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.[27]
History[edit] Main article: History of Mozilla Thunderbird
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if appropriate. Editing help is available. (August 2014)
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 onward, 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."[28]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.[10][29]
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.[30]
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".[31]
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.[32] On July 6, 2012, a confidential memo from Jb Piacentino, the Thunderbird Managing Director at Mozilla, was leaked and published to TechCrunch.[33] 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 make a transition of Thunderbird to a new release and governance model.[13][14]
On November 25, 2014, Kent James of the Mozilla Foundation announced on the Mozilla blog that active contributors to Thunderbird gathered at the Mozilla office in Toronto and discussed the future of the application. They have decided that more staff are required to be working full-time on Thunderbird so that the Foundation can release a stable and reliable product and make progress on features that have been frequently requested by the community. They have also set up a roadmap for the next major release, Thunderbird 38 due in May 2015.[15] 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.