Mozilla Thunderbird mɒˈzɪlə ˈθʌndərbɜrd is a
freeFree software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
,
open sourceThe term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
,
cross-platformIn computing, cross-platform, or multi-platform, is an attribute conferred to computer software or computing methods and concepts that are implemented and inter-operate on multiple computer platforms...
e-mailAn email client, email reader, or more formally mail user agent , is a computer program used to manage a user's email.The term can refer to any system capable of accessing the user's email mailbox, regardless of it being a mail user agent, a relaying server, or a human typing on a terminal...
and
news clientA newsreader is an application program that reads articles on Usenet . Newsreaders act as clients which connect to a news server, via the Network News Transfer Protocol , to download articles and post new articles...
developed by the
Mozilla FoundationThe Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...
. The project strategy is modeled after
Mozilla FirefoxMozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
, a project aimed at creating a
web browserA web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
. On December 7, 2004, version 1.0 was released, and received over 500,000 downloads in its first three days of release, and 1,000,000 in 10 days.
Features
Thunderbird aims to be a simple e-mail, newsgroup and news feed client. The
vanillaVanilla software is computer software that is not customized from its delivered form - i.e. it is used without any customizations applied to it...
version is not a
personal information managerA personal information manager is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to Personal information management as a field of study...
, although the Mozilla Lightning extension adds PIM functionality. Additional features, if needed, are often available via other extensions.
Message management
Thunderbird can manage multiple e-mail, newsgroup and news feed accounts and supports multiple identities within accounts. Features like quick search, saved search folders ("virtual folders"), advanced message
filterA filter is a computer program to process a data stream. Some operating systems such as Unix are rich with filter programs. Even Windows has some simple filters built into its command shell, most of which have significant enhancements relative to the similar filter commands that were available in...
ing, message grouping, and labels help manage and find messages. On
LinuxLinux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
-based systems, system mail (
movemailMovemail is a computer program by the GNU Project that moves mail from a user's Unix mailspool to another file. It is part of GNU Mailutils.A compromising of Movemail was the backbone of the hack described in The Cuckoo's Egg by which Markus Hess broke into the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory...
) accounts are supported.
A still unsolved problem regards the possibility to archive email messages on disk. When exporting a message, by saving or dragging and dropping, the timestamp of the exported file given by Thunderbird is that of the moment in which the file was exported. For archiving reasons it would be necessary that exported file had the timestamp corresponding to the moment in which it was sent or received.
Junk filtering
Thunderbird incorporates a
BayesianBayesian spam filtering is a statistical technique of e-mail filtering. It makes use of a naive Bayes classifier to identify spam e-mail.Bayesian classifiers work by correlating the use of tokens , with spam and non spam e-mails and then using Bayesian inference to calculate a probability that an...
spamEmail spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email , is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE...
filter, a whitelist based on the included address book, and can also understand classifications by server-based filters such as
SpamAssassinSpamAssassin is a computer program released under the Apache License 2.0 used for e-mail spam filtering based on content-matching rules. It is now part of the Apache Foundation....
.
Extensions and themes
Extensions allow the addition of features through the installation of
XPInstallXPInstall is a technology used by the Mozilla Application Suite, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird and other XUL-based applications for installing Mozilla extensions that add functionality to the main application....
modules (known as "XPI" or "zippy" installation) via the add-ons website which also features an update functionality to update the extentions. An example of a popular extention is Lightning, which adds calendar functionality to Thunderbird.
Thunderbird supports a variety of
themeIn computing, a skin is a custom graphical appearance achieved by the use of a graphical user interface that can be applied to specific software and websites to suit the purpose, topic, or tastes of different users....
s for changing its overall look and feel. These packages of
CSSCascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...
and
imageA digital image is a numeric representation of a two-dimensional image. Depending on whether or not the image resolution is fixed, it may be of vector or raster type...
files can be downloaded via the add-ons website at
Mozilla Add-ons.
Standards support
Thunderbird supports
POPIn computing, the Post Office Protocol is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by local e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a remote server over a TCP/IP connection. POP and IMAP are the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for e-mail retrieval. Virtually all modern...
and
IMAPInternet message access protocol is one of the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for e-mail retrieval, the other being the Post Office Protocol...
. It also supports
LDAPThe Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is an application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol network...
address completion. The built-in
RSSRSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...
/
AtomThe name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a...
reader can also be used as a simple news aggregator. Thunderbird supports the
S/MIMES/MIME is a standard for public key encryption and signing of MIME data. S/MIME is on an IETF standards track and defined in a number of documents, most importantly RFCs. S/MIME was originally developed by RSA Data Security Inc...
standard, extensions such as
EnigmailEnigmail is an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite, SeaMonkey internet suite and Mozilla Thunderbird that provides public key e-mail encryption and signing. Enigmail works under Microsoft Windows, Unix-like, and Mac OS operating systems...
and support for the OpenPGP standard.
List of supported IMAP extensions: https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Supported_IMAP_extensions
File formats supported
- mbox
mbox is a generic term for a family of related file formats used for holding collections of electronic mail messages. All messages in an mbox mailbox are concatenated and stored as plain text in a single file...
– Unix mailbox format
- Mork
Mork is a computer file format used by several email clients and web browsers produced by Netscape, and later, Mozilla Foundation. It was developed by David McCusker with the aim of creating a minimal database replacement that would be reliable, flexible, and efficient, and use a file format close...
– used for internal database
- SQLite
SQLite is an ACID-compliant embedded relational database management system contained in a relatively small C programming library. The source code for SQLite is in the public domain and implements most of the SQL standard...
– also used for internal database (since version 3)
Cross-platform support
Thunderbird runs on a wide variety of platforms. Releases available on the primary distribution site support the following operating systems:
- Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
- Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
- Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
- OS/2
OS/2 is a computer operating system, initially created by Microsoft and IBM, then later developed by IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2," because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 " line of second-generation personal...
and eComStationeComStation or eCS is a PC operating system based on OS/2, published by Serenity Systems. It includes several additions and accompanying software not present in the IBM version of the system.-Differences between eComStation and OS/2:...
- OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris was an open source computer operating system based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems. It was also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the software...
The source code is freely available and can be compiled to be ran on a variety of other architectures and operating systems.
Internationalization and localization
Thunderbird does not yet support UTF8SMTP (RFC 5336) or Email Address Internationalization.
With contributors all over the world, the client is translated into at least 52 languages.
Security
Thunderbird provides enterprise and government-grade security features such as
SSL/TLSTransport Layer Security and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer , are cryptographic protocols that provide communication security over the Internet...
connections to IMAP and SMTP servers. It also offers native support for
S/MIMES/MIME is a standard for public key encryption and signing of MIME data. S/MIME is on an IETF standards track and defined in a number of documents, most importantly RFCs. S/MIME was originally developed by RSA Data Security Inc...
secure email (
digital signingA digital signature or digital signature scheme is a mathematical scheme for demonstrating the authenticity of a digital message or document. A valid digital signature gives a recipient reason to believe that the message was created by a known sender, and that it was not altered in transit...
and message
encryptionIn cryptography, encryption is the process of transforming information using an algorithm to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, usually referred to as a key. The result of the process is encrypted information...
using
certificateIn cryptography, a public key certificate is an electronic document which uses a digital signature to bind a public key with an identity — information such as the name of a person or an organization, their address, and so forth...
s). Any of these security features can take advantage of smartcards with the installation of additional extensions.
Other security features can be added through extensions. For instance,
EnigmailEnigmail is an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite, SeaMonkey internet suite and Mozilla Thunderbird that provides public key e-mail encryption and signing. Enigmail works under Microsoft Windows, Unix-like, and Mac OS operating systems...
offers
PGPPretty Good Privacy is a data encryption and decryption computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting and decrypting texts, E-mails, files, directories and whole disk partitions to increase the security...
signing, encryption, and decryption.
Optional security protections also include disabling loading of remote images within messages, enabling only specific media types (sanitizer), and disabling
JavaScriptJavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
.
The French military uses Thunderbird and contributes to its security features, which are claimed to match the requirements for
NATO's closed messaging system.
History
Originally launched as Minotaur shortly after Phoenix (the original name for
Mozilla FirefoxMozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
), the project failed to gain momentum. With the success of the latter, however, demand increased for a mail client to go with it, and the work on Minotaur was revived under the new name of Thunderbird, and migrated to the new toolkit developed by the Firefox team.
Significant work on Thunderbird restarted with the announcement that from version 1.5 onwards, the main Mozilla suite would be designed around separate applications using this new toolkit. This contrasts with the previous all-in-one approach, allowing users to mix and match the Mozilla applications with alternatives. The original Mozilla Suite continues to be developed as
SeaMonkeySeaMonkey is a free and open source cross-platform Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code...
.
On December 23, 2004,
Project LightningThe Lightning project, announced on December 22, 2004, and in development by the Mozilla Foundation, produces an extension that adds calendar and scheduling functionality to the Mozilla Thunderbird mail and newsgroup client and SeaMonkey internet suite...
was announced which tightly integrated
calendarA calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial, or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months, and years. The name given to each day is known as a date. Periods in a calendar are usually, though not...
functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird, and which is now available as an extension.
On October 11, 2006,
QualcommQualcomm is an American global telecommunication corporation that designs, manufactures and markets digital wireless telecommunications products and services based on its code division multiple access technology and other technologies. Headquartered in San Diego, CA, USA...
and the Mozilla Foundation announced that "future versions of
EudoraEudora is an e-mail client used on the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also supports several palmtop computing platforms, including Newton and the Palm OS....
will be based upon the same technology platform as the open source Mozilla Thunderbird email program." The project is code-named
PenelopePenelope is an extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client software implementing some features of Eudora.-History:On October 11, 2006, Qualcomm announced that development of the existing Eudora email client software had ended, and that future versions of Eudora would be based on the same...
.
In late 2006,
DebianDebian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...
rebranded Thunderbird as Icedove due to trademark and copyright reasons. This was the second product to be rebranded.
On July 26, 2007, the
Mozilla FoundationThe Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...
announced that Thunderbird would be developed by an independent organization, because the
Mozilla CorporationThe Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Mozilla Firefox and SeaMonkey Navigator web browsers and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client by a growing global community of...
(a subsidiary of the foundation) was focusing on Mozilla Firefox development.
On September 17, 2007, the
Mozilla FoundationThe Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...
announced the funding of a new internet communications initiative with Dr. David Ascher of ActiveState. The purpose of this initiative was "to develop Internet communications software based on the Thunderbird product, code and brand".
On February 19, 2008,
Mozilla MessagingMozilla Messaging was a wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. It was broadly tasked with aspects of the Mozilla Project that focused on interpersonal communications, such as instant messaging and e-mail...
started operations as a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation responsible for the development of email and similar communications. Its initial focus was on the then upcoming version of Thunderbird 3. Alpha Preview releases of Thunderbird 3 were codenamed "Shredder".
On April 4, 2011, Mozilla Messaging was merged into the Mozilla Labs group of the Mozilla Foundation.
, the current version is Thunderbird 7.0.1.
Thunderbird 3 no longer supports versions of Windows prior to Windows 2000 (i.e., Windows 95, 98, ME and NT) and Mac OS X versions prior to 10.4 Tiger.
Similar to the release schedule of Firefox, corresponding development stages Beta, Aurora and Nightly of Firefox for Thunderbird is called Beta, Earlybird and Daily. The release dates and Gecko versions are exactly the same as Firefox, for example, Firefox 7 and Thunderbird 7 was both released on September 27, 2011 and was both based on Gecko 7.0.
Thunderbird 2
Windows
- Operating System: Windows 98, ME, NT 4.0, XP, Server 2003, Vista
Minimum Hardware: 64 MB RAM
Mac
- Operating System: Mac OS X 10.2 and later
Minimum Hardware: 128 MB RAM
Linux
- Minimum Hardware: 64 MB RAM
Thunderbird 3
This Release no longer supports versions of Windows prior to Windows 2000 (e.g., Windows 95, 98, ME and NT) and Mac OS X versions prior to 10.4 Tiger.
Thunderbird 3.1
Windows
- Operating system: Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, 7
Minimum Hardware: Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater)
Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP: 768 MB RAM (Recommended: 1GB RAM or greater)
Windows 2000: 256 MB RAM (Recommended: 512 MB RAM or greater)
52 MB hard drive space
Mac
- Operating system: Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5, 10.6
Minimum Hardware: A Macintosh computer with an Intel x86 or PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor
256 MB RAM (Recommended: 512 MB RAM or greater)
200 MB hard drive space
Linux
- Software requirements:
Note: Linux distributors may provide packages for the respective distribution which have different requirements.
The following packages and libraries are required for Thunderbird to run:
- GTK+GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...
2.10 or higher
- PangoPango is an LGPL licensed open source computing library used by software developers for laying out and rendering text in high quality, emphasising support for multilingual text...
1.14 or higher
- GLibGLib is a cross-platform software utility library that began as part of the GTK+ project. However, before releasing version 2 of GTK+, the project's developers decided to separate non-GUI-specific code from the GTK+ platform, thus creating GLib as a separate product...
2.12 or higher
- X.OrgX.Org Server refers to the X server release packages stewarded by the X.Org Foundation,which is hosted by freedesktop.org, and grants...
1.0 or higher
The following packages and libraries are recommended for optimal functionality:
- NetworkManagerNetwork Manager is a software utility aimed at simplifying the use of computer networks on Linux-based and other Unix-like operating systems.- Overview :...
0.7 or higher
- HALHAL was a software project providing a hardware abstraction layer for Unix-like computer systems.HAL is now deprecated on GNU/Linux systems, with functionality being merged into udev as of 2008–2010...
0.5.8 or higher
- DBus 1.0 or higher
- GNOMEGNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...
2.16 or higher
Thunderbird 4
This version number was skipped in order to match the versioning number to Firefox for the combined release plan, wherein the new versions of both are released simultaneously.
Thunderbird 5 to Thunderbird 8
Windows
- Operating system: Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, 7
Recommened Hardware: Pentium 4 or newer (with support for SSE2),
1GB RAM or greater
200 MB hard drive space
Mac
- Operating system: Mac OS X 10.5, 10.6
Minimum Hardware: A Macintosh computer with an Intel x86 processor (PowerPC support was dropped in Thunderbird 5)
512 MB RAM
200 MB hard drive space
Linux
- Software requirements:
Note: Linux distributors may provide packages for the respective distribution which have different requirements.
The following packages and libraries are required for Thunderbird to run:
- GTK+GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...
2.10 or higher
- PangoPango is an LGPL licensed open source computing library used by software developers for laying out and rendering text in high quality, emphasising support for multilingual text...
1.14 or higher
- GLibGLib is a cross-platform software utility library that began as part of the GTK+ project. However, before releasing version 2 of GTK+, the project's developers decided to separate non-GUI-specific code from the GTK+ platform, thus creating GLib as a separate product...
2.12 or higher
- X.OrgX.Org Server refers to the X server release packages stewarded by the X.Org Foundation,which is hosted by freedesktop.org, and grants...
1.0 or higher (version 1.7 is recommended)
The following packages and libraries are recommended for optimal functionality:
- NetworkManagerNetwork Manager is a software utility aimed at simplifying the use of computer networks on Linux-based and other Unix-like operating systems.- Overview :...
0.7 or higher
- HALHAL was a software project providing a hardware abstraction layer for Unix-like computer systems.HAL is now deprecated on GNU/Linux systems, with functionality being merged into udev as of 2008–2010...
0.5.8 or higher
- DBus 1.0 or higher
- GNOMEGNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...
2.16 or higher
See also
- Penelope (e-mail client)
Penelope is an extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client software implementing some features of Eudora.-History:On October 11, 2006, Qualcomm announced that development of the existing Eudora email client software had ended, and that future versions of Eudora would be based on the same...
- Mozilla Calendar Project
The Mozilla Calendar Project is the name for the Mozilla project that led to the development of Sunbird calendar application and the Lightning integrated calendar...
- Mozilla's Lightning
The Lightning project, announced on December 22, 2004, and in development by the Mozilla Foundation, produces an extension that adds calendar and scheduling functionality to the Mozilla Thunderbird mail and newsgroup client and SeaMonkey internet suite...
Calendar Extension
- Mozilla Corporation software rebranded by the Debian project, including Icedove
- List of e-mail clients
- Comparison of e-mail clients
The following tables compare general and technical features of a number of email client programs. Please see the individual products articles for further information. This article is not all-inclusive or necessarily up to date.-General:...
- List of news clients
- Comparison of feed aggregators
The following is a comparison of notable RSS feed aggregators. Often e-mail programs and web browsers have the ability to display RSS feeds. They are listed here, too.Many BitTorrent clients support RSS feeds for broadcatching ....
External links