A while ago, in the best developers series, we talked about the Mozilla Foundation, but in this article we will focus on its email client called Thunderbird. The goal of the tool was to create a platform that is lighter and more agile than the commercial platforms on the market.
The History of Mozilla Thunderbird
On December 7, 2007, the foundation launched version 1.0 of Thunderbird, and in its first 10 days it received 1,000,000 downloads. Although the email client was released a while after the Mozilla Firefox browser, its updates always went hand in hand.
In 2011, both applications were updated with the Gecko rendering engine, which adapts to web standards. After a few years of neglect with the email client updates, in 2014 Kent James of the Mozilla Foundation announced that Thunderbird will be updated frequently by the community (the next stable version will be released in May 2015).
Features of Thunderbird
Thunderbird is an email client, with news server, chat (XMPP, IRC, Twitter), powerful migration assistant, possibility of configuring multiple accounts (POP, IMAP, SMTP and SSL/TLS), one-click address book, message history, reminders and a powerful search engine, among many other features. One of the main advantages of Thunderbird is the possibility of incorporating extensions and changing the theme.
From the official client page, you can download the plugins and then install them. They will allow you to expand the platform's features (email signing, security and privacy, expanding the dictionary or calendar, among other Thunderbird extensions). The installation of the add-ons is done through the installation of "XPInstall modules".
Regarding themes (it uses the XUL interface language), you can also download them from the official tool page, so you can change Thunderbird's design whenever you want (the downloaded packages contain images and CSS files).
The utility supports RSS and Atom news readers, although these engines can be expanded through plugins. Thunderbird supports the mbox email formats (Unix), maildir, Mork (although it is being considered to remove this format from the application) and mozStorage. If you want to manage your email accounts with an agile tool and with the full support of a large community, Thunderbird is one of the best options.
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free application (its source code is freely available) and is officially available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and unofficially for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, OS/2 and eComStation.
