thunderbird

Mozilla isn't just about browsing anymore.

While the foundation made its name with the increasingly popular open-source Firefox browser, it is quickly moving beyond its roots, particularly in the area of e-mail. With the launch of Raindrop, its Google Wave-like unified messaging and collaboration system, as well as corporate uptake of Thunderbird, Mozilla may soon extend its reach well beyond its browser base.

Corporate America hasn't done much with Mozilla's Thunderbird, a competitor to Microsoft Outlook. Europe, however, has given it a warm reception. For example, the French tax authority recently selected Thunderbird to power 130,000 … Read more

Do you pine for the Netscape Communicator days with unified browser and e-mail software but want something more current? Mozilla on Tuesday released SeaMonkey 2.0, which combines Firefox and Thunderbird.

The new version, for Windows, Mac, and Linux, is rebuilt with Firefox 3.5.4 and is more closely aligned with the standalone browser. "SeaMonkey is now much closer to Firefox as far as user profiles, add-ons, and functionality of user interface elements are concerned," according to the release notes. Among other changes:

• Retrieving e-mail using the IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) protocol is faster, and for … Read more

Mozilla's Thunderbird team has been working on software called Raindrop that aims to unify communications channels such as e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter into a single interface with enough built-in smarts to separate the important messages from the routine.

"E-mail used to house the bulk of the conversations that took place on the internet, but that's no longer the case today. In today's world people use a combination of Twitter, IM, Skype, Facebook, Google Docs, e-mail, etc., to communicate. For many of us this means that we have to keep an eye on an ever-growing number of … Read more

Outlook, Thunderbird, and Yahoo Mail put Gmail and Hotmail to shame in one important area: handling attachments. Moving e-mail-attached files to a folder on your PC is a breeze in Outlook, Thunderbird, and Yahoo Mail. Doing the same in Gmail and Hotmail? Forget it!

Freeware strips e-mail attachments in a few clicks Back in June 2008, I wrote about Kopf Outlook Attachment Remover donationware, which lets you save some or all of the files attached to Outlook messages to your PC or network. The program adds a button to Outlook's menu that opens a single dialog box showing your … Read more

Mozilla released a major update Tuesday to the beta build of its desktop e-mail client Thunderbird, debuting a new search feature, "smart" folders, an activity manager for monitoring communication with your mail server, and better Gmail integration among the list of improvements. Thunderbird 3 beta 4 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The smart folder view condenses your various in-boxes into one gestalt in-box, but it's easy to switch back to the traditional view if you don't like it. In the folders pane, use the left and right arrows at the top right to change … Read more

As the social-networking e-mail client Postbox approaches its announced general release date at the beginning of September, the cross-platform program updates with what looks to be more a "tidying-up" release. Available for Windows and Mac, Postbox 1.0 beta 15 introduces a new version of the Thunderbird calendar plug-in Lightning, improved contact searching, and other performance tweaks--but not much else.

Derived from Mozilla Thunderbird, Postbox beta 15 will also let you drag and drop e-mails from one account to another and introduces a crash reporter that had been strangely missing until now. Search queries that return no results … Read more

One of the better Mozilla Thunderbird extensions is ThunderBrowse, which allows users to quickly open e-mailed links in a browser window built into the e-mail client itself. The latest version introduces support for the Thunderbird-derived Postbox, as well as compatibility fixes for the Thunderbird 3 beta builds and a new click engine.

However, for users who haven't checked out or updated ThunderBrowse in awhile, there's a lot to play with. Through the expansive options menu, you can configure links to open in new tabs. This allows your original e-mail to stay open in one tab, while the link … Read more

A couple of weeks ago, I described how to sync contacts between Outlook, Gmail, and your iPhone. The program missing from this contacts mega-merge was Thunderbird (download for Windows | Mac), and for good reason. Mozilla's free e-mail program is not particularly contact-friendly.

The first time I attempted to use Mozilla Thunderbird's import function to bring my Gmail contacts into the client e-mail application, I was seriously disappointed with the results. Most of the contact information was squished into a single nondescript field for each record. The few fields that did make the conversion were incomplete. The entire process was pretty worthless, overall.

Then I found the free Zindus add-on for Thunderbird. The program brings a subset of contact fields from Google and Zimbra into Mozilla's free e-mail program. For Google, the fields imported include the contact's name, primary and secondary e-mail addresses, phone numbers, IM names, company, title, and notes. (I didn't test the program with Zimbra.)

After you download and install Zindus, a "Zindus" option is added to Thunderbird's Tools menu. Clicking it opens the Zindus Configuration Settings dialog box where you're presented with a handful of contact-sync options, including a Sync Now button.

… Read more

Using Mozilla's own code, Postbox rivals Thunderbird for alternative desktop e-mail clients. Or at least, it wants to. Make no mistake, Postbox introduces some innovations that Mozilla could learn from. Much as Songbird changes Firefox's tune for audiophiles, Postbox takes desktop e-mail hard toward Web 2.0, with fast links to upload contacts to Facebook and pictures to Picasa.

Click on an e-mail, and the preview pane not only shows the text, but extracts all links, images, other attachments, and contacts into a Compose Sidebar for easy management. From there, you can upload to Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace, Delicious, … Read more