Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free,[10] open source, cross-platform email, news, and chat
client developed by the Mozilla Foundation.
The project strategy was modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web
browser. On December 7, 2004, version 1.0 was released, and received more than 500,000
downloads in its first three days of release, and 1,000,000 in 10 days.[11][12]
On July 6, 2012, Mozilla announced the company was dropping the priority of Thunderbird
development because the continuous effort to extend Thunderbird's feature set was mostly
fruitless. The new development model is based on Mozilla offering only "Extended Support
Releases", which deliver security and maintenance updates, while allowing the community to
take over the development of new features.[13][14]
On November 25, 2014, Kent James of the Mozilla Foundation announced that more staff
are required to be working full-time on Thunderbird so that the Foundation can release a
stable and reliable product and make progress on features that have been frequently
requested by the community. They have also set up a roadmap for the next major release,
Thunderbird 38 due in May 2015.
Features[edit]
Thunderbird is an email, newsgroup, news feed, and chat (XMPP, IRC, Twitter) client.
The vanilla version is not a personal information manager, although theMozilla
Lightning extension adds PIM functionality. Additional features, if needed, are often available
via other extensions.
Message management[edit]
Thunderbird can manage multiple email, newsgroup, and news feed accounts and supports
multiple identities within accounts. Features such as quick search, saved search folders
("virtual folders"), advanced message filtering, message grouping, and labels help manage
and find messages. On Linux-based systems, system mail (movemail) accounts are
supported.
Junk filtering[edit]
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.[16]
Extensions allow the addition of features through the installation of XPInstall modules (known
as "XPI" or "zippy" installation) via the add-ons website that also features an update
functionality to update the extensions. An example of a popular extension is Lightning, which
adds calendar functionality to Thunderbird.
Thunderbird supports a variety of themes for changing its overall look and feel. These
packages of CSS and image files can be downloaded via the add-ons website at Mozilla
Add-ons.
Standards support[edit]
Thunderbird supports POP and IMAP. It also supports LDAP address completion. The builtin RSS/Atom reader can also be used as a simple news aggregator. Thunderbird supports
the S/MIME standard, extensions such as Enigmail add support for the OpenPGP standard.
List of supported IMAP
extensions: https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Supported_IMAP_extensions
Thunderbird also uses Mork and (since version 3) MozStorage (which is based
on SQLite) for its internal database. Mork was due to be replaced with MozStorage in
Thunderbird 3.0.,[19] but the 8.0 release still uses the Mork file format. The current version
of SeaMonkey, version 2.14.1, also still uses Mork for its indexes for both POP and
IMAP mail folders (at least).
especially) can have nested email folders with arbitrary length paths and filenames that
cannot be stored under their intended paths and names.[18]
Cross-platform support[edit]
Thunderbird runs on a variety of platforms. Releases available on the primary distribution
site support the following operating systems:[20][21]
Linux
Windows
OS X
FreeBSD[22]
OpenBSD[23]
OpenSolaris
OS/2 and eComStation[24][25]
The source code is freely available and can be compiled to be run on a variety of other
architectures and operating systems.
Security[edit]
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 messageencryption using certificates). Any
of these security features can take advantage of smartcards with the installation of
additional extensions.
Other security features may 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.
The French military uses Thunderbird and contributes to its security features, which are
claimed to match the requirements for NATO's closed messaging system.[27]
History[edit]
Releases
Thunderbird development releases occur in three stages, called Beta, Earlybird, and
Daily, which correspond to Firefox's Beta, Aurora, and Nightly stages. The release dates
and Gecko versions are exactly the same as Firefox; for example, Firefox 7 and
Thunderbird 7 were both released on September 27, 2011, and were both based on
Gecko 7.0.