A post on the The Rumbling Edge, Mozilla’s site for cutting-edge developments, lists the features and improvements that will appear in Thunderbird 2.0 Alpha 1.0, which has not yet been released.

Top of the list are custom Folder Pane Views for things like favorites, unread and recently used email. You will also be able to tag messages, and open multiple messages in individual tabs.

The new version will offer built-in notification of new email, which may look something like this:

You will be able to get pop-up summaries of the contents in folders.

Security will be enhanced with an improved Bayesian algorithm and better protection from Phishing.

Lastly, it will offer support for “find as you type” filtering.

The post lists all the many more fixes and improvements in detail, including twelve Mac-specific issues.

I see nothing to tempt me away from Mail.app, but it is interesting to see how Thunderbird is developing.

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Portable Thunderbird is—as the developers describe it—Thunderbird “packaged so you can carry around with you on any portable device, USB thumb drive, iPod, portable hard drive, memory card, other portable device (also on your internal hard disk) as long as it has 33 MB of free space and use on any Mac OS X computer, taking your email, address book and account settings with you.”

The new version updates the mail client to 1.5.0.2 and provides a new icon.

It would be great if an option like this existed for Mail.app. Since it doesn’t, Portable Thunderbird is the next best thing.

It’s freeware and you can get it from FreeSMUG’s portable apps section , also home to things like Portable Gimp, Portable OpenOffice and Portable RSSowl.

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The latest version of Thunderbird features several important security updates.

Six of the eight security patches are rated by Mozilla as critical. You can see the full list of them on the Mozilla site.

The update also promises improved “product stability”.

You can update your version by clicking on Help > Check for updates… in Thunderbird’s menubar or get it from the Thunderbird download page .

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Five quickies:

1. Seamonkey 1.0 , the open source next generation of the Netscape communicator suite has been released. Although it is based on the Mozilla 1.8 code base, Seamonkey is not the same thing as Thunderbird plus Firefox. The projects have taken off in slightly different directions. You can find a good chart of the differences on Chirs Ilias’ web site. UPDATE: The Blue Ferret reviews Seamonkey.
2. Rob Griffith at MacWorld offers a tip that shows you how to reply to an email while keeping the original open in its own window (Hold down the Option key while clicking on Reply, Reply All or Forward).
3. Speaking of the rise and rise of the Mail-like look, Fraser Spiers is suffering Expos?ɬ© confusion . So many of his apps now look like Mail.app that it is hard to tell them apart. UPDATE: He has posted an even more striking photo of the confusion on flickr.
4. David Pogue shows you how to reconfigure the Address Book of a Motorola Razr (the world’s top-selling cell/mobile phone) to make it more user-friendly and efficient to use. Nice one!. See also, if you are into that sort of thing, his comparison between the Razr and the Blade , Samsung’s new Razr clone.
5. A spammer writes to say, “I read over your blog, and i found it inquisitive.” Honestly!

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NetShred is a stand-alone app that protects your privacy on the Internet by shredding the browsing histories and caches of your browsers and email clients.

It supports all the main browsers and the following email clients - Mail.app 1 and 2, Eudora 5, Eudora 6, Mailsmith 2.x, Mozilla 1.x and Netscape 7.x.

After launching the app (a process that can be automated so that occurs at start-up) , its main screen presents you will an overview of its abilities:

Installed browsers are highlighted in green, active ones in red.

Caches and histories can only be securely shredded when the app is closed. You can either do this manually, or set NetShred X to perform the shredding automatically when you exit the app.

The Preference Pane provides further options:

Here you can set the degree of automation that you want, what you would like the app to shred, what degree of shredding you require and how many write-overs you would like.

A further tab allows you to specify which browsers and email clients NetShred should monitor and shred.

In this day and age people have more reason than ever to think about their online privacy. NetShred X takes care of that for you and is a good complement to ShredIt, a general purpose shredder from the same developer.

NetShred is shareware (USD 19.95). A fully featured demo is available from the developer’s web site.

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Two quick Thunderbird things:

1. FreeSMUG has posted a portable build of Thunderbird 1.5 that you can put on a memory stick or any other portable medium.

   You will need at least 33 MB of free space, but you can then take your Thunderbird with you (complete with emails and contacts) and use it on any Mac.

2. The Mozilla Wiki carries news of progress towards a version of Thunderbird that will run on the new Intel Macs.

   The article describes what needs to be done, how they are going to do it, and also links to the latest Intel Mac builds of Thunderbird, Firefox and Camino.

Now Mozilla users can enjoy portable browsing and email.

It would be very cool to see something similar for Mail.app.

You can put your Mail folder on an iPod or memory stick and use Apple Mail on whatever Mac you have to hand, but that’s nowhere near as elegant a solution.

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