Software Update: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2

dArtagnan submits the following piece of text: “Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2 has been released and is available for download from the FTP server† Thunderbird is a free, open source and cross platform mail client and news reader for most modern operating systems such as Windows, Linux and Macintosh. It offers a number of advantages over other mail clients such as junk filtering. The Gecko engine, the engine also used by Mozilla, ensures that the most standards-compliant way to render web content is used. The changelog is up this one page read:”

changes

• Footprint and Performance
  Since 0.1, we have made excellent strides in reducing code footprint and improving performance. The download file size for Windows has been reduced by 1.5MB and is substantially faster than 0.1.
• Improved Default Theme
  Arvid Axelsson continues to improve the crisp, fresh, and attractive theme based on Qute, his amazing theme for Mozilla Firebird. Updates include new icons for the options dialog, and improvements to the icons for both the mail and compose toolbars. Also added are new taskbar icons for Windows and dock icons for Mac OS X.
• Improved Spell Checker
  The spell checker now ignores quoted text when composing a reply (HTMLand plain text), and also ignores any URL inside the message body.
• Redesigned Options Dialog
  The ‘Options’ dialog got theme updates (see above), a streamlined ‘Advanced’ panel, and a new ‘Attachments’ panel for managing behavior when opening mail attachments.
• Improved customization
  The Compose window toolbar now supports a ‘Quote’ button. The Mail window toolbar now supports a ‘Previous’ button.
• Improved Stability
  This release is based on the Mozilla App-Suite 1.5 beta branch.

Known Issues
This list covers some of the known problems with Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2. Please read this before reporting any new bugs, and watch it regularly (we’ll update it as new bugs are found in the release). Because this is only our second milestone release, we realize we have a lot of work to do ahead of us! At the same time we are very excited about Thunderbird and want to share with you our current level of progress.

• The default theme is not complete yet. We are still using a lot of Mozilla classic theme icons. Arvid is working on the artwork and you will continue to see it improve going forward.
• Unix users: our integration with the operating system has not been implemented yet. Clicking on HTTP URLs in mail messages fails to launch your default Linux browser. We hope to address this in the next release. We recognize how important this is for our unix users and apologize in advance.
• To add a non-English dictionary, read the installation instructions.
• OSX users: if you close all open Thunderbird windows you will get a very strange menu bar filled with Seamonkey looking menu items, most of which don’t do anything. We still need to implement this ‘hidden window’ in Thunderbird. Hopefully we’ll have this by the third milestone.
• OSX users: We don’t have a ‘Windows’ menu item in the menu bar which allows you to toggle through the open application windows yet. We hope to have this in the near future too.
• Turning on junk mail adaptive filter detection is a per account preference (Tools / Junk Mail Controls / Adaptive Filters). However the UI makes it look like it is a global setting. To turn it on for several accounts, click on the Settings tab, change the account menu list to the right account then go back to the Adaptive Filter panel and make the decision to enable or disable automatic junk detection.
• The progress-meter in the mail 3-pane does not become visible when performing operations. It stays hidden all the time.
• We do not currently migrate your Mozilla profile to Thunderbird. If you just want to try Thunderbird out, use a new profile and enter in your mail account information. You can migrate your Mozilla profile by hand, although we do not recommend it.
• If you configure a POP account to not download message bodies over a certain size we later fail to download the rest of the message body when you click on the download rest of message link.
• If you want to make Mozilla Thunderbird your default mail client on Windows, we recommend going through Tools / Options General instead of going through the operating system. We fail to register a key with the OS when you go through Windows’ Internet Options.
• The Mark All Read keyboard short cut does not work on Linux.

[break]The source of Mozilla Thunderbird is here to take down. In addition, this release is available for download in the following versions:

Windows 32 bit
Linux with GTK2 and XFT
MacOS X