French military turns Thunderbird into Trustedbird

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December 14th, 2009
Viktor Petersson

Trustedbird-logoA while back we reported that certain branches of the French government were switching their desktop email clients to Thunderbird.

One of these branches who switched to Thunderbird was the French military. However, in order for Thunderbird to fit their particular requirements, quite a few modifications were required.

Thanks to the openness of Thunderbird, the French military were able to develop extensions to address some of their needs and modified the source code to address core changes. But they didn’t stop there. Instead of just keeping their changes to themselves, they open sourced them. Then, together with Mozilla they bundled the add-ons with a Thunderbird and created their own fork, named Trustedbird. Kudos to the French military!

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Thunderbird 3 is here!

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December 8th, 2009
Viktor Petersson

thunderbirdMozilla just announced the release of Thunderbird 3. It’s a major improvement from the, by now, outdated Thunderbird 2.

If you’re a faithful reader of our blog, you know we’re really excited about Thunderbird 3 and that we’ve followed the releases of the betas and release candidates closely. If you haven’t read our posts, here are the major new features in version 3:

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Thunderbird 3 RC2 Released

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December 2nd, 2009
Viktor Petersson

thunderbird-logoJust a few days after releasing Thunderbird 3 RC1 (that we covered here), the guys and gals over at Mozilla rolls out RC2. The full release notes are available here.

Among the new changes, we find an improved wizard for adding accounts (very similar to what we saw in the latest release of Postbox), a redesigned Mail Toolbar, Smart Folders enabled by default, a new birthday field in the address book and more.

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Thunderbird 3 RC1 Released

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November 27th, 2009
Viktor Petersson

thunderbird-logoToday Mozilla announced the launch or the first released candidate of their long awaited Thunderbird 3. The list of changelog since the late release, beta 4, is very extensive and includes a lot of important fixes and improvements. On the core-level, Thunderbird 3 RC1 now uses Gecko 1.9.1.5.

Back in September I wrote a very positive review of Thunderbird 3 Beta 4. I was personally very impressed with Beta 4, and I’m sure RC1 won’t be a disappointment. Let the countdown to Thunderbird 3 stable begin.

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Mozilla Thunderbird 3 to be Released on Monday

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November 6th, 2009
Gregory Minton

thunderbirdMozilla, primarily known for its popular Firefox browser, is set to release Thunderbird 3, the updated version of its e-mail software, on Monday, November 9, 2009 [we reviewed Thunderbird 3 Beta 4 here]. According to Chief Executive David Ascher, the newest version of Thunderbird will be much more web focused than its predecessor. “There are a bunch of actions that start in e-mail that really involve the Web,” Ascher says, alluding to the new web based capabilities of Thunderbird 3.

One of these new web capacities is the new Raindrop feature, which will attempt to integrate common inboxes, such as Facebook, Twitter, and – of course – e-mail [we covered Raindrop here]. The focus of Raindrop will be to allow users to choose what is most important to work on at any given time. (The capacity to make split decisions about the workflow of items in ones’ inbox calls to mind our recent article on how to use David Allen’s Getting Things Done system with e-mail.)

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French Government Goes Open Source with Mozilla and OBM

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October 29th, 2009
Viktor Petersson

Thunderbird Logo01.net today reported (French | Google Translate) that two governmental institutes that recently merged will be moving to a unified Open Source-based solution. The institutes is the General Tax Directorate (DGI) and the Directorate General of Public Accountancy (DGCP) merged to create the General Directorate of Public Finance (DGFiP).

DGI with 80,000 users previously used Lotus Notes, while DGCP with 50,000 users was using Microsoft Outlook (presumably with Exchange, but the article does not reveal this). On the desktop-side, this new solution will be using Mozilla Thunderbird for email with the Lightening calendar extension.

It might also be worth mentioning that this is not the first time a French government switches over to Thunderbird. The Department of Defence for instance, have already switched over 70,000 users over to Thunderbird.

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Will Raindrop become email 2.0?

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October 23rd, 2009
Viktor Petersson
Mozilla Labs Raindrop

Mozilla Labs Raindrop

Raindrop is a very innovative concept from Mozilla Labs. Like countless others these days, Mozilla tries to reinvent email (or rather online communication). So what is Raindrop? A simplified answer is that Raindrop is a communication aggregator with a focus on prioritizing and classifying messages. One of the core objectives of Raindrop is simply to distinguish generic newsletters or broadcasts from personal messages (regardless if that’s a DM on Twitter or a personal email). That sounds like a great idea, but how does it work?

There are three parts to Raindrop, a back-end that fetches the messages, a database (CouchDB) which stores the messages, and a web-based front-end that displays the messages. While Raindrop is still in a very early stage, this project has great potential. Raindrop has been designed to be extremely flexible and modular so as to enable simple expansion.

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Taking Thunderbird 3 Beta 4 for Mac OS X out for a spin

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September 25th, 2009
Viktor Petersson

Thunderbird LogoWhile Mozilla is best known for their web browser FireFox they also develop the Thunderbird email client with the catchy slogan “Reclaim your inbox”. A few days ago Mozilla launched a new beta version of Thunderbird. Today I took it out for a spin. I haven’t used Thunderbird in quite a while, so a lot of things are new to me, but I’ll try to focus on the new features in this release.

First impression

My first impression of this new version of Thunderbird is that it is a major improvement over the 2.0 series. While 2.0 felt old and bulky, the new version feels much more modern and light. As far as design goes, Apple Mail is still ahead of Thunderbird. Yet, if features are more important than looks, Thunderbird is probably a winner already.
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