Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Released

We have something new from Mozilla, the folks who bring you Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc.

Let's start with the Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Release Notes:

What's New in Thunderbird 2:

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.

To be honest, this didn't thrill me. I didn't take advantage of this feature much in GMail though either. I know some will rave about this, to each their own. Tags are certainly popular with a large segment of the userbase.

Visual Theme: Thunderbird 2's theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability and maximize screen real estate.

Session History Navigation: Back and Forward buttons allow navigation through message history.

Advanced Folder Views: Customize the folder pane to show favorite, unread or recent folders.

Nice.

Easy Access to Popular Web Mail Services: Gmail and .Mac users can access their accounts in Thunderbird by simply providing their user names and passwords.

This was a nice touch. It even defaulted a new GMail account to pop.gmail.com:993, and SSL, which is something that always had to be done manually, afterward. Definitely handy in the "newbie-friendly" sense, which is an area that an app like this really should be designed to handle well. I didn't see any trace of .Mac here though.

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 New Mail Notification Alerts: New mail alerts include information such as the subject, sender and message preview text.

Similar to some of the GMail-notifier add-ons for FireFox. Most useful when (periodic?) auto-downloading of mail is enabled.

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: Finds and highlights message text as you type.

Always a good thing.

Improved Filing Tools: Recent folder menu items for moving and copying messages to recently used folders. Move / Copy again functionality.

This could be useful.

Updates to the Extension System: The extension system has been updated to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions.

I'm not sure I know what "enhanced security" really means there, but it's at a FeelsGood buzzword, at least.


New discoveries

One of the first places I check out in any Mozilla-based application, is Edit > Preferences, where of course, I discovered something new, but which will feel familiar to many FireFox users.

Edit > Preferences > Advanced > General > Advanced Configuration > Config. Editor button brings up a new-to-Thunderbird interface reminiscent of about:config for FireFox. Those who want to tweak beyond to "chrome" of the GUI can probably sate their desires here. I still have yet to spend much time digging through the gems to be found here.

And if you add a new Address Book card, or edit an existing one, you will find something new there as well. Under the Contact tab, there are still three regions, Name, Internet, and Phones, as before. But there is a new checkbox at the bottom of the Internet region, "Allow remote images in HTML mail". Apparently this can now be configured on a per-person basis, which is certainly a nice option to have (and with the right level of granularity too.)


Possible problems

It's only fair to bring up the one flaw that I have found so far. Thunderbird pops up an error screen when connecting to GMail, stating "Unable to verify the identity of pop.gmail.com as a trusted site." and then, when clicking on "Examine certificate...":
Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons
It gives a couple of possibilities for this.
Perhaps Thunderbird doesn't recognize Equifax as a CA any more? Perhaps Google has changed something overnight and misconfigured their servers? Those seem unlikely. Perhaps I am the vicitim of a MitM attack, with someone spoofing GMail to get access to my private information? Somehow I suspect it is probably safe to assume otherwise.


What else is new?

There are certainly many new or improved features in Thunderbird 2 which I have not touched on here, and of course that's part of the excitement of a new release, discovering those for yourself. Have I gotten you sufficiently interested yet? Thunderbird 1.5 will only be supported until October 18, 2007.

Before you wander off to download a copy of Thunderbird 2.0.0.0, I should perhaps point you to the minimum system requirements.

Or, start at the Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Release Notes like I did with this post.