Free Penguin download - Thunderbird
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Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation.
The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox,
a project aimed at creating a web browser.
On December 7, 2004, version 1.0 was released, and received over 500,000 downloads in its first three days of release (and 1,000,000 in 10 days). As of 2008, Thunderbird has been downloaded more than
60 million times since 1.0 release. Thunderbird aims to be a simple e-mail, newsgroup and news feed client.
The vanilla version is not a personal information manager, although, with the Mozilla Lightning extension, a big part of a PIM functionality is added.Additional features, if needed, are often available via other extensions. Thunderbird can manage multiple e-mail, newsgroup and RSS accounts and supports multiple identities within accounts.
Features like quick search, saved search folders ("virtual folders"), advanced message filtering, message grouping, and labels can help manage and find messages.
On Linux-based systems, system mail (movemail) accounts are supported. Thunderbird incorporates a Bayesian spam filter, a whitelist based on the included address book, and can also understand classifications by server-based filters such as SpamAssassin. Extensions allow the addition of features through the installation of XPInstall modules (known as "XPI" or "zippy" installation).
One example is Lightning, the calendar extension mentioned above. Extensions and themes (below) available on the Mozilla Update site may be upgraded through the client. Thunderbird supports a variety of themes for changing
its overall look and feel.
These packages of CSS and image files can be
downloaded from Mozilla Add-ons. Thunderbird supports POP and IMAP. It also supports LDAP address completion.
The built-in RSS/Atom reader can also be used as a simple news aggregator.
Thunderbird supports the S/MIME standard and extensions like Enigmail add support for the OpenPGP standard. With contributors all over the world, the client is translated into at least 36 languages/locales, covering a wide number of languages. Thunderbird provides enterprise and government-grade security features such as SSL/TLS connections to IMAP and SMTP servers.
It also offers native support for S/MIME secure email (digital signing and message encryption using certificates).
Any of these security features can take advantage of smartcards with the installation of additional extensions. Other security features can be added through extensions.
For instance, Enigmail offers PGP signing, encryption, and decryption. Optional security protections also include disabling loading of remote images within messages, enabling only specific media types (sanitizer), and disabling JavaScript.
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