Software Update: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4

Mordred draws our attention to version 0.4 of Mozilla Thunderbird. This program can retrieve and send e-mail via the IMAP and POP protocols, and check the e-mail for spam messages. In addition, Thunderbird can post and read messages in newsgroups. Using extensions and themes the mail client can be customized to your own taste. What exactly changed is in the 0.4 release can be read below:

Improved Look

• The default theme for Mozilla Thunderbird has taken a huge leap forward. The theme is about 90% complete with only a few “classic” looking icons remaining.
• The message list pane now shows status for reply, forward and unread as icons directly on the message envelope instead of using text.
• The message list pane now has a separate sortable column for attachment status on a message.
• The Windows animated alert has a new look and feel. It now shows the Account name instead of your server user name.

Improved Interoperability With the OS

• Linux: Thunderbird properly dispatches browser URLs to the default browser. Read more about how to hook this up.
• Mac OS X: Added a Windows menu which makes it easier to manage open Thunderbird windows. The menu bar behaves correctly after closing all open windows. Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird can be run at the same time with out the two builds interfering with URL dispatching between applications.
• Windows: Thunderbird can be set as the default mail client and/or as the default news client.

New Features

• Windows users can copy and paste images (including screen shots) from the Windows clipboard into HTML mail compose.
• Only mark a message as read when it has been open in the preview pane for a configurable number of seconds.
• More options for customizing toolbars the way you want them. Enhancements include: a mark button in the main mail window and copy/cut/paste icons in mail compose.
• Profile Migration from Netscape 4.x has seen a lot of improvements.
• A Palm Sync Address book conduit extension is now available for Thunderbird 0.4.
• POP Accounts now support aging on the server.

Recently Fixed Bugs

• No more new mail alert notifications when the incoming messages are Junk.
• The progress bar now appears in the mail 3-pane window when reporting progress for operations like downloading new mail or a message body.
• Auto Proxy URLs now work.
• POP Accounts: “Click here to download the rest of the message” now works.
• POP Accounts: A new filter action to delete a message from POP3 server if messages are left on the server by default.
• Junk Folder Purging works on all accounts and not just the first one.
• If you configure a mail server to use secure authentication but the server does not support it, Thunderbird no longer silently falls back to insecure authentication. Thunderbird brings up an error dialog and refuse to connect to the server.
• News error dialogs no longer hang the application.
• HTML Anchors in messages work.
• When threads are sorted by date, Thunderbird sorts by the newest message in the thread.

Known Issues

• *Important* If you used a prior version of Thunderbird and installed themes OR extensions, you need to do the following or Thunderbird will NOT run properly. Find your profile directory. There should be a sub directory called chrome. Remove everything in chrome. This will not affect your mail data or preferences. You will then need to re-install the 0.4 compatible version of any themes/extensions you want.
• The default dictionary is English-only. To add a non-English dictionary, read the installation instructions.
• The enable/disable option for adaptive junk mail detection appears to apply to all accounts (Tools / Junk Mail Controls / Adaptive Filters). It is, however, a PER ACCOUNT option. To set the option for a specific account, choose the account in the ‘Account:’ dropdown on the ‘Settings’ panel, then switch to the ‘Adaptive Filters’ panel and set the option. Repeat per account as needed.
• Mozilla App-Suite profiles are not currently migrated to Thunderbird. You can migrate your Mozilla profile by hand, although we do not recommend it. Even if you simply want to preview Thunderbird, we encourage you to start with a new profile (you can re-use it if you decide to preview a later release).
• Clicking on scrollbars in the autocomplete type down field fails to scroll.
• Tools / Options / Attachments / Attachment Folder setting is not remembered.
• Some users are discovering they suddenly cannot send or get messages for any of their accounts. If this happens to you, please check your user prefs.js file and see if the following value was set: “user_pref(“network.online”, false);” If so, remove it. Report in on the forums if you triggered this behavior.
• The default theme is almost finished. There are still some Classic theme icons in the UI. Please do not file bugs about icons not being converted to the new theme.
• Linux: The ‘Mark All Read’ keyboard shortcut does not work.
• Mac OS X: Thunderbird does not open mailto/news urls from other apps.
• Mac OS X: Attachment file names in certain charactersets (like Korean) do not render quite right.
• If you use the mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote preference, it no longer accepts HTML. It is a unicode pref and you can use a UTF-8 editor to add international characters.
• When viewing a message with an inline image, the context menu item “View Image” brings up a small blank window.

[break]The following downloads are available:
Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4 Linux x86
Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4 MacOS X
Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4 Windows
Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4 Source