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Thunderbird 2.0.0.17 Email Client Released

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Mozilla's Thunderbird 2 email application is more powerful than ever. Its now even easier to organize, secure and customize your mail.

Thunderbird is a full featured stand-alone email client based on the design of the mail module in the Mozilla suite browser, which in turn was derived from the old Netscape Communicator Messenger module.

Mozilla.org has released Thunderbird 2.0.0.17 for Mac OS X.

Fixed in Thunderbird 2.0.0.17:
• security issues

Fixed in Thunderbird 2.0.0.16

  • MFSA 2008-34 Remote code execution by overflowing CSS reference counter

  • MFSA 2008-33 Crash and remote code execution in block reflow

  • MFSA 2008-31 Peer-trusted certs can use alt names to spoof

  • MFSA 2008-29 Faulty .properties file results in uninitialized memory being used

  • MFSA 2008-26 Buffer length checks in MIME processing

  • MFSA 2008-25 Arbitrary code execution in mozIJSSubScriptLoader.loadSubScript()

  • MFSA 2008-24 Chrome script loading from fastload file

  • MFSA 2008-21 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.8.1.15)



The Thunderbird developers' mission objective is to produce a cross platform standalone mail application using the XUL user interface language. The intended customer is someone who uses Mozilla Firebird (or another standalone browser) as their primary browser and wants a good, solid email client to go with it.

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Thunderbird incorporates the three-pane mode familiar to users of OS X Mail and Outlook Express, et al., It's fast, reasonably easy to configure, and will be familiarly intuitive to use for folks who like three-pane email clients. It's also freeware, and one of the most sophisticated free email clients.

Thunderbird 2 features many new enhancements to help you better manage your unruly inbox, and stay informed. Thunderbird 2 scales to the most sophisticated organizational needs while making it easy to find what you need.

Mozilla Thunderbird 2 is reloaded and more powerful than ever. Its now even easier to organize, secure and customize your mail.

Keep Your Vital Information Organized

Thunderbird 2 features many new enhancements to help you better manage your unruly inbox, and stay informed. Thunderbird 2 scales to the most sophisticated organizational needs while making it easy to find what you need.

Advanced Folder Views

Advanced Folder View screenshot

Thunderbird 2 offers a variety of ways for you to organize and display your folders, whether by favorites, recently viewed or folders containing unread messages. As always, you can also set up RSS and newsgroup folders to stay on top of news and your interests. Thunderbird 2 also allows you to maximize your message view pane by opting for a folder drop down menu instead of the traditional sidebar.

Message Tagging

Message Tagging screenshot

Thunderbird 2 allows you to “tag� messages with descriptors such as “To Do� or “Done� or even create your own tags that are specific to your needs. Tags can be combined with saved searches and mail views to make it easier to organize email.

Message History Navigation

Message History screenshot

Thunderbird 2 offers message history navigation that allows you to click “forward� and “back� much like in your Web browser. You can now quickly toggle between messages and folder views.

Improved Search

Improved Search screenshot

Thunderbird 2 features a find as you type pane that speeds up searches within displayed messages. Thunderbird also offers quick search, which starts showing search results as soon as you start typing in search terms.

Saved Searches

Saved Search screenshot

Do you find yourself searching for the same subject or message content over and over? Thunderbird 2 saves you time by allowing you to store this search as a folder. Rerunning the search is just a matter of clicking on the saved search folder in the folder pane.

Stay Informed

Stay Informed screenshot

Thunderbird 2 has been updated to provide more informative and relevant message alerts containing sender, subject and message text for newly arrived messages. Folders provide a pop up summarizing new messages in that folder.

Easy Access to Popular Web Mail Services

Easy Access screenshot

Thunderbird 2 makes it even easier to integrate and use various Web mail accounts from one inbox. Gmail and .Mac users can access their accounts in Thunderbird by simply providing their user names and passwords.

Secure and Protect Your Mail

Mozilla has bolstered Thunderbirds acclaimed security and privacy measures to ensure that your communications and identity remain safe. Its like having your own security guard online.

Phishing Protection

Phishing Protection screenshot

Thunderbird protects you from email scams which try to trick users into handing over personal and confidential information by indicating when a message is a potential phishing attempt. As a second line of defense, Thunderbird warns you when you click on a link which appears to be taking you to a different Web site than the one indicated by the URL in the message.

Robust Privacy

Thunderbird 2 offers improved support for user privacy and remote image protection. To ensure a users privacy, Thunderbird 2 automatically blocks remote images in email messages.

Cutting Out the Junk

Mozilla has updated Thunderbirds popular junk mail folders to stay ahead of spam. Each email you receive passes through Thunderbird's leading-edge junk mail filters. Each time you mark messages as spam, Thunderbird “learns� and improves its filtering so you can spend more time reading the mail that matters. Thunderbird can also use your mail provider's spam filters to keep junk mail out of your inbox.

Open Source, More Secure

At the heart of Thunderbird is an open source development process driven by thousands of passionate, experienced developers and security experts spread all over the world. Our openness and active community of experts helps to ensure our products are more secure and updated quickly, while also enabling us to take advantage of the best third party security scanning and evaluation tools to further bolster overall security.

Automated Update

Thunderbirds update system checks to see if youre running the latest version, and notifies you when a security update is available. These security updates are small (usually 200KB - 700KB), giving you only what you need and making the security update quick to download and install. The automated update system provides updates for Thunderbird on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in over 30 different languages.

Get Your Mail, Your Way

Thunderbird allows you to customize your email to suit your specific needs whether its how you search and find messages or listening to music right out of your inbox.

Outfit Your Inbox

Thunderbird users can increase Thunderbirds functionality and appearance using hundreds of add-ons. A Thunderbird add-on can let you manage contacts, place voice over IP calls, listen to music, and keep track of birthdates all from your inbox. You can even change the appearance of Thunderbird to suit your tastes.

Message Templates

Thunderbird 2 allows you to easily set up message templates to save you time â€" especially if you have to send the same mail message repeatedly.

Add-ons Manager for Extensions and Themes

The new Add-ons Manager improves the user interface for managing extensions and themes, making it even easier for you to customize Thunderbird 2. Install, uninstall, enable and disable your add-ons in a single place.

Junk Mail filtering
Thunderbird provides effective tools for detecting junk mail, that analyze your email and identify those that are most likely to be junk. You can automatically have your junk mail deleted or you can put it in a folder you specify, just in case you like reading junk mail.

Your Mail, Your Way
View your email the way you want it. Access your email with Thunderbird's new three-column view. Customize your toolbar, change its look with themes, and use Mail Views to quickly sort through your email.

Safe and Secure
Thunderbird provides enterprise and government grade security features such as S/MIME, digital signing, message encryption, support for certificates and security devices.

Versatility
Thunderbird gives you IMAP/POP support, a built-in RSS reader, support for HTML mail, powerful quick search, saved search folders, advanced message filtering, message grouping, labels, return receipts, smart address book LDAP address completion, import tools, and the ability to manage multiple e-mail and newsgroup accounts.

Expandability
Thunderbird lets you add additional features as you need them through extensions. Extensions are a powerful tool to help you build a mail client that meets your specific needs.

Thunderbird is a good e-mail client with an impressive features set, but it puzzles me why a one trick pony email application has to be an 11 MB download and a bloated 34 MB when expanded -- not including user profile folders and such? I mean, Opera, which incorporates a full-featured Web browser, an email client and chat client/newseader into one application, is just 4.5 MB to download and 9.5 MB expanded. ThunderBird has fewer features than Eudora, but is about six times as large.

Thunderbird will not allow a virus or worm to execute automatically. You can see what attachments have been sent to you without a virus being able to execute, and you would have to save a file to your system and deliberately run it before it could cause any harm.

Commendably, Thunderbird's mail files are in the standard plain text "mbox" format, which many mail programs can use or import. Some proprietary mail programs have a function to import from Eudora, which also uses the "mbox" format; this function should read your Mozilla mail files properly.

System requirements:

Operating Systems
• Mac OS X 10.2.x and later

Minimum Hardware
• Macintosh computer with an Intel x86 or PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor
• 128 MB RAM (Recommended: 256 MB RAM or greater)
• 200 MB hard drive space

Mozilla Thunderbird is freeware.

For more information, visit:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/

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