Version 2.0 of Mozilla's open-source email client, Thunderbird, has been released.
The updated application, available for download only a week after the version's first release candidate became available, now offers better integration of webmail services, such as Google Mail, message tagging and enhanced mail-search functionality, and it is more customisable than before.
Scott MacGregor, Mozilla's lead engineer for Thunderbird, claimed the new version had "proven security" and would offer an improved experience to users. "In Thunderbird 2, we incorporated the proven benefits of tagging to email," MacGregor said on Thursday, explaining that tagging "initially gained popularity on blogs, photo and link-sharing sites as an intuitive way to organise online information so users could easily find desired content". The email client offers default tags, such as "Important" and "Personal", but also allows customised tags.
Join in
Who owns your old email messages?
"If a member of staff leaves, is the email address that he was using owned by him or the company?"
Thunderbird is built on the same development model as Firefox, Mozilla's open-source browser, which is increasingly taking market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Thunderbird 2 even incorporates a similar method of history navigation to that used in Firefox. It also incorporates a "find-as-you-type" pane and the ability to store searches as folders.
The application still does not support ActiveSync, which would let it synchronise content with Windows Mobile handsets, but a multitude of third-party add-ons are available to perform this and other functions.
Thunderbird does not include a calendar function, unlike its chief rival Outlook. Mozilla does, however, have an add-on called "Lightning", which integrates some of that functionality into Thunderbird.
Talkback
I've been a fan of Thunderbird since version 0.5 as i was struggling to find a desktop mail client that offered me a simple but flexible solution. I had tried the standard Outlook express and found it ok yet limited in functionality.
The new features in this release are not massive but add some features that were either missing or lacking in certain areas. One of my favourites is the customised tags that can allow you to filter your email quickly and not have the limit of 5 tags as in previous versions.
I handle the lack of calender functionality by pointing the start page in Thunderbird to my Google calender. Works a treat plus as it's web based there's no updating in 2 places and accidentally missing something important.