Thunderbird 2.0 Ready to Hatch
Thunderbird 2.0 Ready to Hatch
by , 3:45 PM EDT, April 5th, 2007
The Thunderbird developers are in their final phase of Thunderbird 2.0 development, according to Scott MacGregor, the Thunderbird Lead Engineer.
Thunderbird 2.0, RC2 is scheduled to be released by the end of the week for testing, Mr. MacGregor told TMO in an interview. "If all goes well, and no problems are found, then RC2 will be the final release, scheduled for about the end of April."
The Thunderbird e-mail program is an open source, cross-platform project. It has hundreds of active technical contributors and tens of thousands of nightly testers. It is available in 35 languages.
Version 2.0 has focused on improving three areas: e-mail organization, security, and customization. Specifically:
- Message Tagging: metadata for better searches.
- Advanced folder views.
- Informative message alerts.
- Easier setup and integration with .Mac and Gmail.
- Phishing protection.
- Junk mail filters.
- An Open Source security model.
- Best of breed plug-ins pre-loaded.
Thunderbird will also provide a basis for the Eudora "Penelope" project in which the Eudora look-and-feel will be joined to the Thunderbird core.
TMO asked about Mac OS X address book integration. "We've started on that," Mr. MacGregor said, "but the full integration will have to wait until version 3."
The current release of Thunderbird is version 1.5. For Mac, the system requirement is Mac OS X 10.2.x or later.
Observer Comments
Thu Apr 05, 2007 4:34 pm Subject: Address book...
As far as I'm concerned a mail product on a mac without address book support is still a .beta release. But that's just one man's opinion. I really like the idea of message tagging, but in real life I never have the time or the inclination to actually use it.
The address book I actually USE on a regular basis, so it's crucial.
Lately I've been lamenting mail's crappy search support... lack of support for operators like & * - or "". WIthout address book support though, any mail program is a time burner for me.
QuoteGuest wrote:
I think this article is a little confusing. There IS an Address Book built into Thunderbird, it's just not Apple's Address Book. I agree that integration with this and Spotlight would make Thunderbird a better Mac citizen, Thunderbird is still extremely usable as is.
Address Book (notice the caps) integration is essential for me. I already have to deal with keeping three address books together (Now Contact, Address Book and my Palm), and trying to keep it all working with Thunderbird as well? Sorry. I tried T-bird, but when I discovered that I couldn't get reliable Address Book integration, it was in the bin. It's a nice app for what it's worth, but on Mac OS X, you need to integrate with the built-in Address Book for it be a true player.
-Jon
I keep trying to like Thunderbird. It's super-duper fast on both my Mac Pro (at work) and my MacBoook Pro (home), but the way it deals with attachments is VERY annoying. At the very least, they need to have a little expanding window at the TOP of the message (like Entourage) and honor the Mac's built-in file-type identifier mechanisms, rather than whatever half-baked Mozilla MIME-based file-type system is used currently.
I've got this working just today. See http://www.dennis.ca/weblog/2007/04/17/howto-make-spotlight-and-google-desktop-index-thunderbird-messages/
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