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.thunderbird, portable, email, mozilla, flashdrive, usbdrive

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.