Alphas are very early development releases and should only be tried by developers and testers. Among other improvements, Lanikai Alpha 1 includes:

• Several improvements to IMAP.
• Several fixes for Smart Folders, message filters, and attachment handling.
• Several design improvements and corrections to the interface.
• Download Manager is now accessible as a menu item (Tools > Saved Files).
• Stability and memory improvements.

As detailed in the creative brief, the update would keep the general layout and palette, could add an @ to the envelope, make the icon more 3D with more layers wrapping the envelope, make the icon more round, and extend the head feathers to the back.

Below, some historic sketches of the original Thunderbird icon.

Thunderbird is also nominated in the Communication category.

Among other Mozilla related products there are XMarks, formerly Foxmarks, which started as a bookmark synchronizing Firefox add-on; as well as the social-oriented Flock, and mobile browser Skyfire in the Browsing category. Postbox is nominated in the Communications category.

Opera, Chrome, WebKit, Maxthon, triple-engined Lunascape, and Safari are all also nominated in the browsing category.

Vote at Webware 100 before April 30.

Sick of having to surf to all your favorite sites and services? Flock integrates Facebook updates, Twitter feeds, YouTube videos, Flickr photo streams, Gmail and Yahoo Mail, and blogging tools into a single navigation (and browsing) interface.

In 21st place, and just ahead Safari for iPhone, yet-to-be-released Firefox 3:

Firefox 3, in beta, builds on its predecessor’s strengths by adding better security and new tools for storing and accessing your bookmarks and your browsing history.

Thunderbird 2 also makes the list in the 42nd position.

As planned, this new release has the main goal of letting Thunderbird users that its email client is alive and healthy and this alpha packs a year of work since the last major Thunderbird release.

Like Firefox 3, Shredder Alpha 1 is based on Gecko 1.9 featuring the same memory improvements we have seen suring its development. It also brings one of its limitations: Thunderbird 3 will be available for Windows 2000 and later Windows releases. Windows 95/98/Me users are out.

While at this stage, any feature can hardly be considered final (think Places in Firefox 2), there’s some interesting stuff to look at:

Most notable, messages can be opened in individual tabs effectively reducing the clutter. It’s not the default behavior for double clicking on a message though, you will have to right click and select Open message in new tab.

Like Firefox 3, the Add-ons Manager is now integrated with Mozilla Add-ons so you can easily search and install themes and extensions without leaving Thunderbird. instead of downloading the .xpi or .jar files, you just have to click on Add to Thunderbird… to install an add-on.

For Mac OS X users, Thunderbird is now a native Cocoa application and integrates with Mac’s address book.

Venkman (a JavaScript debugger) and DOM Inspector are both now available for Thunderbird through Mozilla Add-ons.

There’s still no sign of the most significant feature planned for Thunderbird 3: integrating Lightning, a Thunderbird extension that adds full calendaring functionality, as this release is more about consolidating all the work of the year into a release.

A second alpha, targeted for July, should be another interesting update as there is an intensive ongoing brainstorming for easier ways for users to search and organize their messages, contacts and agendas.

With Thunderbird, if you go the nightlies way, you should know you are checking your email with a shredder: a bad move and it’s buh-bye to your beloved years-old mail archive. So it has been aptly named Shredder and now Mozilla Messaging is looking for a logo that reflects its risky nature.

If you have an idea for a logo, you are invited to submit it to the tracking bug in Bugzilla.

Thunderbird 3 is expected to include some interesting features including integration with Lightning, the calendar extension; a visual refresh; STEELE, an API for more powerful extensions, and extensive code cleanup. The first alpha should be out in the next few weeks with a second one to follow on July.

Thunderbird users are encouraged to update by clicking Check for Updates… in Thunderbird’s Help menu, or wait for the update prompt in the next 48 hours.

Like past years, Firefox is running in the web browser and web feed reading sections in the software category. Flock also runs in the web browsers section but strangely neither Opera desktop nor Internet Explorer are listed.

In 2005, Firefox took the top spot following its November 2004 release. The next year, 2006, Firefox 1.5 grabbed 12th place remaining as the top voted web browser. Finally, last year, Firefox 2 slipped to place 35 but became the only web browser in the list.

Thunderbird runs in the email application only, but you can nominate and vote it for web feeds reader as well. Thunderbird was 28th in both, 2005 and the 2006 lists.

Finally, Joost, runs in the Video sites section of the web sites category.

You can vote until April 14 and get a chance to win an iPod Touch. (How cheap!)

And while in voting mode, don’t forget to choose your favorite Firefox 3 T-shirt design and score one for Firefox, Miro and Joost in Webware 100.

Thunderbird 2 is now also available in Afrikaans and Ukrainian.

Thunderbird users will be prompted to update within 48 hours. To get it now, in the Help menu, select Check for updates… and follow the on-screen instructions.

Increasing Thunderbird already large user base will become a priority, as a way to maximize its impact. As a new Mozilla subsidiary it also has the need to achieve financial sustainability and a larger user base would definitely help.

One approach will be adding so much requested calendaring functions to Thunderbird, making it a real competitor for personal information managers, mainly Microsoft Outlook. This means Thunderbird will bundle Lightning, a mega-extension that embeds Sunbird’s calendaring functions. It is not clear if a Lightning-less version will be made available.

Another area is better search capabilities to at least match Gmail and Yahoo! Mail accuracy. A more powerful interface to give extension developers more control and less limitations on what they can do. This already started last November with the announcement of STEEL, which aims to provide an easier interface for developers in the same way FUEL does for Firefox 3.

Overall user experience will be enhanced, for example with message tabs, to avoid the clutter when opening several messages in different windows at the same time. This improvement is already in place in Thunderbird developers releases and can be seen in Spicebird and the modern version of Yahoo! Mail.

In the back-end, they will aim to get rid of some obsolete data formats like Mork and RDF and replace them for easier to maintain data storage like SQLite-based MozStorage (coming with Firefox 3) which provides more powerful access mechanisms and is easier to maintain.

David also provided a rough schedule: first alphas this quarter, beta in the second, more betas now with integrated calendaring in the third and final release by year’s end. It seems that it will have to focus in the precise points mentioned here to stay within this very aggressive schedule.

But I think it is very necessary to have a Thunderbird release this year if only to prove the project is alive and kicking and Mozilla is pretty serious about messaging. Nothing talks better than results.

Thunderbird will also face competition from Spicebird, a project that has already succeeded in merging Thunderbird and Lightning and even XMPP based instant messaging. Could Mozilla hire the whole Synovel team? It would be a great boost in line with the recent head hunting Mozilla went on Humanized.

There’s also the never-heard-about-again topic of bundling Thunderbird and Lightning with OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org still lacks a PIM which the new Thunderbird could deliver, while benefitting from OOo greater business appeal as a Microsoft Office alternative.

The project, dubbed STEEL aims to deliver for Thunderbird what FUEL will do for Firefox 3: an easier way for extension developers to access and program common application components like bookmarks, windows, tabs, events, storage and preferences. In the Thunderbird’s case this could mean accounts, mailboxes, subscriptions, newsgroup, address books, etc.

Where it usually requires learning a specific syntax to access these components, FUEL and, in the future, STEEL will mask these complexity so developers can focus on providing the functionality they want to add. Additionally, it could help ensure the most efficient way to perform certain tasks reducing possibilities of memory leaks and security vulnerabilities.

David Ascher, CEO of currently in formation Mozilla communications subsidiary shared his enthusiasm with this development as it aligns with the strategy of strengthening Thunderbird extension ecosystem.

For the record, while FUEL is an acronym for Firefox User Extension Library, don’t break your mind trying to expand STEEL. According to Joey Minta it came out “after spending about 5 minutes staring at the back of the seat in front of me on a holiday flight”.

To update, select Check for Updates… in the Help menu and follow on-screen instructions.

More details on Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 release notes.

Hunspell also replaced MySpell as OpenOffice.org’s spell checker last year as it provides some unique and welcomed advantages including support for Asian languages, Unicode support, morphological analysis and support for complex compounds and agglutinative languages like Azeri, Basque, Estonian and Hungarian.

MySpell dictionaries are fully compatible with Hunspell which definitely helps for a very easy transition.

Interestingly, while looking around about Hunspell I found that project Runasimipi is creating a Hunspell Runasimi dictionary to be used with localized versions of Abiword, OpenOffice.org and Firefox at least. This looks as an amazing coincidence for me, as some days ago I was thinking about starting a Runasimi localized Firefox.

Runasimi, better known as Quechua (ketch-wa), is and official language in Peru and the second most spoken after Spanish with about 3 million speakers. An estimated total of 7 million speakers are counted in several other South American countries including Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile and Brazil.

As you can see in the screenshot, the folders and messages lists are kept in a separate tab.

It’s still rough in the edges as one may expect from a very early implementation. For example the tab close buttons don’t work and you can’t double click a message to open a tab but this will get worked out in the next few days or weeks along with an option to open message on tabs or windows by default.

Without a doubt a welcomed improvement that Thunderbird 3 users will sure appreciate.

This update features fixes for a couple of moderate security vulnerabilities and stability bug fixes. It is now also available in Korean.

Thunderbird users should receive the update within the next couple of days but you can force it by selecting Check for Updates… in the Help menu and following the on screen instructions.

Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 release notes.

To update, select Check for Updates… in the Help menu.

An update for Thunderbird 2.0 is in the works and will be released soon.

As advertised, when you press the minimize button instead of sending it to the task bar it's added to the system tray bar which helps reduce the clutter. You can customize it to do the same when pressing the close button and whether you need to click once or twice in the system tray Firefox icon to restore the window.

Linux user now have the same functionality thanks to FireTray, a developed by Duo for Firefox on Linux only. Here, a Firefox icon is permanently added to the system tray when Firefox is running. Click on it to minimize to the system tray. I tried it in Ubuntu and works perfectly, however this version works only with Gnome desktops but the developer has announced that future versions will fix this.

Try MinimizeToTray and FireTray at Mozilla Add-ons.

Among several new features in this release, a new way to organize mail by tagging messages as an alternative to old folder classification, is available.

Native support for .Mac and Gmail accounts have been added. Now when creating an account you can select Gmail type and just enter your username and password and you are ready to go.

Another new feature is the option to trace back the messages you have read in the current session with Back and Forward buttons. New mail alerts provide a summary of the subject, sender and a message preview, and you can click the alert to quickly open the message.

The default theme has been updated for better usability. Extensions are able to show and store new message columns, easier to localize and provide stronger security. The installer is now based in NSIS, just like Firefox, and better support for Windows Vista has been added as well.

Download Thunderbird 2 now. For more details, check the release notes.

Thunderbird 2.0 has finally brought Gmail-style tags to your desktop email client. Instead of sorting your messages caveman-style by placing them in static folders -where they’ll rot for eternity- Thunderbird lets you apply as many tags as you like to any message. This allows you to build dynamic search folders based on your tags (or subject, sender, or date received, for that matter), Thunderbird kicks ass!

Gaim, the amazing open source instant messenger, CCleaner, Skype, Torpark, a Firefox-based anonymous browser; PortableApps, which includes Portable Firefox; WinAudit, Google Maps, Logmein Hamachi and Last.fm were the other winners.

FavLoc, a Firefox and Thunderbird extension developed by Justin Scott, fixes this letting you specify favorite locations for your files (for example one for pictures, one for software, another for music files, etc.) and assigning them a short name. Then when you right click on a download link (or an attachment in Thunderbird) you can select to which of those locations you want to save the file. It also works with automatic downloads adding a favorite locations menu to easily choose from.

As usual I would like to see this extension better blended with Firefox’s user interface. For example, remove the Save Link As… item and add an Other location… option. Then add a checkbox ([ ] Make this location a favorite>Name) to the Save As dialog to ease favorite locations definition. Favorite locations could then be sorted/deleted from Options/General.

A great extension you may want to try at Mozilla Add-ons. Vote for this review

Usability: 4/5 – Usefulness: 5/5 – Features: 5/5

Thunderbird will notify about the update soon, but if you don’t want to wait, in the Help menu, select Check for Updates… and follow the onscreen instructions.

I talked to Mark Charlebois, a core member of Penelope’s development team to learn more about the project, its goals and development.

He starts clarifying on what can users expect from Penelope in the mid and long term:
“There will be a completely open source version called Penelope and an official, branded version from Qualcomm called Eudora. This is similar to the Bon Echo/Firefox naming that exists for the open source vs officially branded builds. The 0.1 release will be an extension but will also require some changes to the main Thunderbird codeline to support
Eudora features. We are architecting the Penelope code base to be similar to Lightning. It is an extension that is built as part of the target at compile time.”

As stated in the roadmap, version 0.1, currently in Alpha 12, is focused on providing minimum functionality and user interface so Eudora users can feel comfortable using it. This includes toolbar icons, basic settings and shortcut keys. The screenshot below shows Thunderbird 2 Beta 2 (Thunderbird 1.5.x is not supported) with the Penelope extension installed and enabled.

Regarding the featureset differences between Thunderbird and Eudora, Mark explains: “We have some initial plans for what features will make it into particular releases based on the complexity of those features and the data we have about which features are most frequently used by Eudora users.”

“It is our intent to put a bug in bugzilla for each feature that will be added to Penelope and assign it to a particular milestone release. If someone’s favorite Eudora feature doesn’t have a bug associated with it they are certainly welcome to create one and our team will assign it to the appropritate release.”

“Bugzilla also has a voting system for bugs and we take this as input into the demand for a particular feature.”

Penelope is to some degree a cultural challenge as well as it requires the interaction of commercial and open source development teams, on this, Mark tells “it took a while to get the integration going, but we have had good communication with the Thunderbird folks and they have been very helpful with our questions on the Thunderbird architecture.”

There is no firm date for Penelope 1.0 release but you can follow its development and the Eudora forums and the Mozilla Wiki.

• Message Tags: Create your own tags for organizing email. Messages can be assigned any number of tags. Tags can be combined with saved searches and mail views to make it easier to organize email.
• Visual Theme:Thunderbird 2′s theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability.
• Session History Navigation: Back and Forward buttons allow navigation through message history.
• Folder Views: Customize the folder pane to show favorite, unread or recent folders.
• Improved Support For Extensions: Extensions can now add custom columns to the message list pane in addition to storing custom message data in the mail database.
• Improved Offline Management: Thunderbird (Linux and Windows) automatically adjusts the offline state based on current network connectivity.
• Improved New Mail Notification Alerts:New mail alerts include information such as the subject, sender and message text.
• Folder Summary Popups: Mouse over a folder with new messages to see a summary of the new messages in that folder.
• Saved Search Folder Performance: Search results for saved search folders are now cached, improving folder loading performance.
• Find As You Type
• Improved Filing Tools: Recent folder menu items for moving and copying messages to recently used folders. Move / Copy again functionality.
• Updates to the extension system: The extension system has been updated to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions.
• New Windows installer: Based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, the new Windows installer resolves many long-standing issues.
• MacOS X Universal Binaries

The latest version detects the language you are typing in and sets the dictionary accordingly. According to the author it is an experimental feature, but worked great in my short test. Dictionary Switcher is also available for Thunderbird and you can get the experimental version at the developer’s web site.