Looks like Mozilla has gone through with their promise and spun off Thunderbird to its own development team.  I think this is a good thing so that Thunderbird can get the attention it needs to become its own awesome application.  I also noted Spicebird is a fork of Thunderbird’s code as well.  Looks like they just released another beta version a few days ago so I will have to keep an eye on that one as well.  I use Thunderbird mainly as an email archiving application and use Yahoo Web Mail for most of my emails.

Looks like someone has picked up Mozilla’s Thunderbird code and started adding to it.  This is a good thing as Mozilla is trying to pass off this application so they can focus solely on Firefox.

This is a quote from their site:

‘Apart from having e-mail, instant messaging and group calendaring, an ideal collaboration system should make ‘working together’ possible – like creating a proposal, launching a new product, developing software, managing group knowledge and publishing websites even while working from different continents. Spicebird - the collaboration suite developed by us, creates a platform to do precisely that. In addition, Spicebird makes customization easy and ensures that the software can be adapted to your business collaboration needs.’

So with having some extra time this weekend I looked a little deeper into Thunderbird and some of the new features that you can add to it.  One nice new thing is that you can install a plugin called Lightning which will add an Outlook type calendar to your Thunderbird install.  After installing Lightning as an add-on you can then download a Google Calendar plugin.  This plugin will allow you to select Google as an external calendar.  From there you re-launch Thunderbird and go to the calendar menu and add an external calendar.  Tell it you want to add it from your network then add the private calendar address you can get out of Google’s calendar settings.  This is a nice feature and brings Google calendar to Thunderbird and is always up to date.  Plus with Plaxo now syncing my work calendar and my personal calendars it is a very powerful addition to Thunderbird.  My only complaint is it is a bit slow.

Thunderbird has a default setting to hide remote images for emails that are not ‘trusted’  Since my email does all my filtering all emails I will download are trusted.  You can go into the configuration editor and change the setting for: mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image to FALSE and that will turn this feature off.  To get to the configuration editor, go to Options -> Advanced -> Config Editor (its a button)