Mozilla has released the latest version of its email client with a host of new features, including better security, automatic updating and other enhancements aimed at providing a more user-friendly email experience, according to the company.
Thunderbird 1.5, an open-source application, is available as a free download. Mozilla is a spin-off of the open-source Mozilla Foundation that handles all of the product releases for the group's open-source projects.
According to Scott MacGregor, technical lead on Thunderbird for Mozilla, there have been 18 million downloads so far of the software, which appeals to both consumer and business users. He says that while most think of Thunderbird as a good alternative for a consumer application such as Microsoft's Outlook Express, it also is comparable to enterprise email software such as IBM's Lotus Notes and Microsoft's Outlook.
In fact, MacGregor says some large corporations have migrated to Thunderbird for their corporate email, several of those deployments having more than 40,000 users on the system. However, he says he is not at liberty to provide the names of those companies.
Among the new security features in Thunderbird 1.5 are Kerberos authentication and integration with server-side spam filtering. The new client also includes a built-in phishing detector to help protect users against email scams, providing an "extra line of defense" for preventing users from getting caught up in email identity- and information-theft scams, MacGregor says.
Improvements to the user experience in Thunderbird 1.5 include auto-saving of emails in progress as drafts and automatic spell-checking as an email user types a message. MacGregor also notes that the new automatic updating feature of Thunderbird 1.5 will make users particularly happy, since it means they don't have to keep checking back at the Mozilla web site for the periodic stability builds the Thunderbird team provides for the email client.
"Before you’d have to hear there was an update, or on your own periodically check and see if there's a new product release," he says. "Now we'll let you know." Mozilla also added automatic software updating to its popular Firefox browser in the last release of that offering, Firefox 1.5, which was made available on 29 November.
Thunderbird 1.5 also has new support for podcasting, as well as improvements to how the client deals with RSS (really simple syndication) feeds. Thunderbird 1.5 allows users to access podcasts via a dialog box that provides access to a "helper" application such as a web browser or audio player. The email client can detect whether the podcast is an audio or video file and will play it using the correct player on a user's computer, MacGregor says.
Thunderbird 1.5 users also can receive RSS feed updates as email messages and filter and organise these updates as they would regular email, he says.