Spanish Translation Blog

Tools of the TRADE

Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source email and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. It was released on December 7, 2004, it received a shocking of over 500,000 download hits in its first three days of release, and 1,000,000 in 10 days.

Thunderbird has a whole host of features and add-ons which together provide an all in one interface for reading and organizing email, RSS, web pages, and newsgroups.

Here are some of the main features that I feel are beneficial for our day to day activities:

Subject or Sender Quick Search: While browsing through folders you may have the need to quickly find an email by subject or sender. Thunderbird provides a quick search bar where you can find the message you’re looking for with one click and a few keystrokes.

Sort By: Make finding messages in your folders much easier by choosing from a wide variety of sorting options (e.g. date, star, order received, priority, sender, size, status, subject, read, tags, junk status, attachments, ascending, descending, threaded, unthreaded).

Junk Mail Filtering: By flagging spam in Thunderbird you can use adaptive junk mail filtering to train Thunderbird to recognize spam. Through this “learning process”, and over time, Thunderbird will have the ability to tell apart what you consider spam and filter accordingly.

Unread Folders: Not enough time  to browse your whole folder list looking for the ones with unread messages? If you have tons of email, newsgroup, and RSS folders, Thunderbird includes an unread folders view which makes it much easier to focus on the folders that need attention.

Open Source Add-ons and Plug-ins: No more waiting for Microsoft to update Outlook with that killer feature you think would rock. A whole community of developers out there are collaborating to do just that with Thunderbird plug-ins and add-ons. If worst comes to worst and there has been no one there developing your ideal feature, you can always do it yourself: It is open-source!!!

Cross-platform compatibility: A wide variety of platforms accept Thunderbird as an email application. The primary distribution site displays releases available for operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS, OS2, Open Solaris and much more.

Besides, one more benefit is that the source code is freely available. Hence, it can be compiled and run on a variety of other architectures and operating systems.

STAY TUNED FOR FUTURE EPISODES ON “TOOLS OF THE TRADE”.