As you may know, Thunderbird is an open-source e-mail client and chat client developed by Mozilla. Among others, it has support for email addresses, newsgroup, news feed and chat (XMPP, IRC, Twitter) Client, managing multiple accounts. Also, it has support for different themes and its power can be extended by plugins.
The latest version available is Thunderbird 45.0, which brings changes and new features.
New:
- Add a Correspondents column combining Sender and Recipient
- Much better support for XMPP chatrooms and commands.
- Remote content exceptions: Improved options to add exceptions.
- Implement option to always use HTML formatting to prevent unexpected format loss when converting messages to plain text.
- Use OpenStreetmap for maps (even allow the user to choose from list of map services)
- Allow spell checking and dictionary selection in the subject line
- Allow editing of From when composing a message.
- Add dropdown in compose to allow specific setting of font size.
- Return/Enter in composer will now insert a new paragraph by default (shift-Enter will insert a line break)
- Allow copying of name and email address from the message header of an email
- Mail.ru supports OAuth authentication.
Fixed:
- Fixed: When sending e-mail which was composed using Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters, unwanted extra spaces were inserted within the text.
- Spell checker checked spelling in invisible HTML parts of the message.
- When saving a draft that is edited as new message, original draft was overwritten.
- External images not displayed in reply/forward
- Crashed in some cases while parsing IMAP messages.
- Properly preserve pre-formatted blocks in message replies.
- Copy/paste from a plain text editor lost white-space (multiple spaces/blanks, tabs, newlines)
- “Open Draft”/”Forward”/”Edit As New”/”Reply” created message composition with incorrect character encoding.
- Fixed: Grouped By view sort direction change was broken, plus enabled custom column grouping.
- Fixed: New emails into a mailbox did not adhere to sort order by received.
- Fixed: Box.com attachments failed to upload.
- Fixed: Drag and drop of multiple attachments failed to OS file folder.
- XMPP had connection problems for users with large rosters
Installation instructions:
Mozilla does not provide a repository for Thunderbird, but the installation steps are quite easy anyway and should not create difficulties on any Linux distribution.
The latest versions of Thunderbird are available as pre-compiled libraries via the Mozilla FTP, so we need to download the archive (i386 or i686 for 32 bit systems and amd64 or x86_64 for 64 bit systems), extract it and run the thunderbird file. Also, it is advised to remove previous versions of Thundebird, move Thunderbird to /opt and create a symlink, for an easier usage.
The below instructions should work on all the popular Linux systems, including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pinguy OS, Elementary OS, Deepin, Peppermint, LXLE, Linux Lite, Debian, Robolinux, SparkyLinux, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mageia, OpenMandriva, Arch Linux, Manjaro, ROSA Desktop etc.
How to install Thunderbird on 32 bit Linux systems:
$ wget https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/45.0/linux-i686/en-US/thunderbird-45.0.tar.bz2
$ tar -xjvf thunderbird*.tar.bz2
$ sudo rm -rf /opt/thunderbird*
$ sudo mv thunderbird /opt/thunderbird
$ sudo ln -sf /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird /usr/bin/thunderbird
To start Thunderbird, just open a terminal, type thunderbird and hit enter.
How to install Thunderbird on 64 bit Linux systems:
$ wget https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/45.0/linux-i686/en-US/thunderbird-45.0.tar.bz2
$ tar -xjvf thunderbird*.tar.bz2
$ sudo rm -rf /opt/thunderbird*
$ sudo mv thunderbird /opt/thunderbird.beta
$ sudo ln -sf /opt/thunderbird.beta/thunderbird /usr/bin/thunderbird
To start Thunderbird 38, just open a terminal, type thunderbird and hit enter.
Note: This will replace the version of Thunderbird you have already on your system with Thunderbird 38.