14 DAY TRIAL // Believe it or not, the folks at Mozilla are working hard these days to bring you a major update to one of the best open-source and cross-platform email, news, and chat clients on the market.
If we remember correctly, Mozilla said a while ago that they had no plans to continue working on the Thunderbird application, which was set to receive only minor security updates since version 31.0.
In the meantime, they concentrated their efforts on the big brother, Mozilla Firefox, which has continuously received new features. Now, the time has come for Thunderbird to rise again, as its version number will be finally synchronized next week with Firefox's.
The good news that we want to share with you today is that Mozilla Thunderbird 38.0 is not only a version number upgrade but it's a feature release that brings some interesting new functionality to the application.
Here's what's new in Mozilla Thunderbird 38.0
Support for the Yahoo! Messenger chat protocol, the ability to filter emails when archived, support for filtering sent emails, and support for searching in multiple or all address books are among the most prominent features in Mozilla Thunderbird 38.0.
Furthermore, there will be support for internationalized domain name URLs in the RSS component, the ability to display expanded columns in the folder pane, OAuth2 support for GMail accounts, as well as the ability to add a reading position marker line to email conversations.
Mozilla Thunderbird 38.0 will also bring inputtable character count support in the Twitter editor and maildir local message storage support. A "Learn More" link will be implemented in the feeds subscribe dialog, which will redirect users to the support page.
Another awesome feature implemented in the upcoming Mozilla Thunderbird 38.0 application is the integration of the popular Lightning extension, which will offer out-of-the-box calendaring functionality. However, users will be able to choose if they want to keep or disable Lightning from the get-go.
There will be lots of under-the-hood improvements as well
In addition to the new features mentioned above, there will be lots of bugfixes for some of the most annoying issues reported by users since the previous stable release, and various other under-the-hood improvements, a notable one being that it will no longer use SHA-1 to sign messages.
Mozilla Thunderbird 38.0 will be released alongside Mozilla Firefox 38.0 next week, on May 12, 2015. In the meantime, you can download Mozilla Thunderbird 38.0 Beta 4 for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows if you're curious to see the new features for yourself.