Thunderbird, the Mozilla group"s popular open source email client has just released a 0.7 Release Candidate (RC). The RC has many new features, with notable ones being :
Thunderbird 0.7 bits use the new Extension Manager developed for Firefox. When installing a theme or extension, it must be written to the new EM APIs that Ben Goodger has document for Firefox or it will not install.
Windows installer uses 7-zip compression for a new download size of only 5.9MB (5.7 without talkback)!
Multiple Identity UI for creating multiple identities for a given account, and new inline vCard UI
New profile manager including new profile manager UI.
Signature gets styled in the compose window with the same styles used when you view a signature in the message window.
Color quoting for message qutoes.
OS X fix for Thunderbird locking up when coming out of sleep mode (top 0.6 issue)
OS X: if no Thunderbird windows are open and you click on the system dock icon, we re-open the main mail window. (top 0.6 issue)
The download more option in the spell checker dialog now takes you to a web page with various localized dictionaries.
Junk mail fix where sometimes the junk mail filter would mark a message as junk but fail to move it to the Junk folder.
Minor improvements to the junk mail algorithm.
If you do a custom windows install with the windows installer you now see a screen which asks you if you want desktop/start bar/quick launch icons for the installation.
Sorting is now supported in the news subscribe dialog.
Opening a vCard attachment now opens the vCard internally in our addresss book UI instead of launching an external application.
In the offline settings panel, some of the settings were not being saved (like the one for compacting a folder if it saves X KB"
DOM Inspector is no longer part of the windows installer. It is still part of the full .zip build
On Windows, Thunderbird properly handles mailto url clicks (from a browser or another app) that contain raw unencoded spaces.
Continued IMAP improvements and bug fixes including a potential hang when reading imap over SSL.
All of the 1.7 final bug fixes that weren"t in 1.7 RC1 (which 0.6 was based on)
The new release is well worth downloading a upgrading too; in my personal experience i"ve found these builds to be very stable but if you do encounter any bugs, be sure to log them in Bugzilla. Neowin will soon be publishing a interview with Thunderbird chief developer, Scott McGreggor, so stay tuned!