| Thunderbird 1.5 goes gold |
Jan. 12, 2006
 The new and improved Thunderbird email client took flight Thursday.
While not as well-loved as the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox web browser, this open-source email client has had more than 18 million downloads since its launch in December 2004, according to Mozilla.
Thunderbird 1.5, as we expected from our review of the December beta of the program, is an outstanding email client. While it still doesn't support contact management or calendaring, thus making it unsuitable for enterprise uses, individual and small business users will be pleased with this new version.
"With a host of new and improved features, Thunderbird 1.5 provides users with a robust, free email alternative," said Mozilla vice president of products Christopher Beard.
"Thunderbird enhances the overall email experience, adding anti-phishing capabilities to help keep people safer, while also integrating and simplifying access to new technologies, such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication)," said Beard.
The improved Thunderbird offers such new features as a built-in "phishing" detector and support for listening to podcasts.
The program has also improved its spam and filtering control. In our recent evaluation, we were also pleased with its improvements in memory handling and searching along with overall speed and reliability. Thunderbird also now supports inline spell checking and can automatically save drafts.
It also now handles multiple SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) servers correctly. In the past, while you could list multiple SMTP servers, Thunderbird would actually only use one of them.
Thunderbird is now available as a free download for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. For Linux users, the program comes in a compressed file without an installer, and experienced Linux users should have no trouble installing it. Others might want to wait until RPM or DEB versions of the program become available.
One drawback of the current release is that the matching Mozilla calendar component is not yet available.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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