v2.0 is almost complete. This past week I worked on completing the additions of languages and versions, and also made quite a few adjustments in order to accomodate the new database and its relationships. v2.0 should hit production within the next week (pending testing).

Thunderbird 1.0 came out this week, which was relatively lackluster in the wake of the Firefox 1.0 release. Polvi agreed that the lack of excitement is partially a result of market share and competition. Mail clients are largely web-based, and those that aren’t are pretty thorough and do not posess many of the security flaws or standard-ignorance that IE posesses in the browser market. Regardless, you should get your hands on it and test it out. By the way, bouncer is dealing out Thunderbird 1.0 — http://download.mozilla.org/?product=thunderbird&os=win&lang=en-US. 🙂

Nonetheless, Thunderbird is a great program, and beats the crap out of Outlook Express. That said, it’ll be interesting to see what happens with the mail client world — will it start to merge with the web or maintain its tradition of being relatively stand-alone? Time will tell.

One interesting point is that with the development of Gecko and XUL, why did Mozilla try to develop a stand-alone mail client? Isnt’ the idea behind the revolution the un-desktopilization (holy crap – new word!) of the internet and its applications? The future of the desktop lies in the browser and its integration with modules that expand on HTTP — I think developing a complex XUL-based extension to Firefox might have been in line with what some see as the next generation of desktop applications.

My thought is that in order to get consumer buy-in for Thunderbird and increased interest in the foundation, Mozilla needed to cater to the existing market, which means creating replacement tools that are much better in the ways of security and functionality. When, though, will we collectively take the plunge towards a more seamless web/mail browsing environment? The next ten years will be very interesting.

All things considered, Thunderbird is an excellent application and I use it exclusively. Mutt fanatics and Outlook junkies aside, it is probably the best solution around if you’re looking for a newsgroup/mail client that is not retarded. The development team did a great job.

Thunderbird isn’t circa 2040, but as a desktop app, it kicks ass in 2004-05.