Officials at the Mozilla Foundation are getting ready to release the final
version of Thunderbird 1.0 next week, officials said Friday.
That word comes just two days after the open source organization — more
popularly known for development of the standalone Firefox
Web browser — released a preview Thunderbird 1.0 release candidate (RC) of
its standalone e-mail client.
According to a Mozilla spokesperson, the organization is reluctant to
announce a set-in-stone release date because, as an open-source project,
there might be last-minute fixes or enhancements that necessitates a
delay.
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Thunderbird is a cross-platform, free e-mail
client with many of the same features found in premium, proprietary e-mail
applications. To date, officials say Thunderbird .9 and the 1.0 RC have
garnered just over one million downloads.
Because it’s open source, Thunderbird gives developers the chance to access
and modify the application’s source code using third-party
“extensions” that allow for custom-built modifications to the base
functionality — a selling point that’s proven popular
for Firefox users.
Thunderbird code is based on the Mozilla suite, a combination e-mail, IRC
and newsgroup client and HTML