Despite the fact that the Mozilla developers have neglected Thunderbird lately, they are now working at bringing major improvements to their email client, Thunderbird 38 (currently beta). Among others, support for the Yahoo! Messenger chat protocol will be implemented, a new feature for filtering both archived emails and sent emails will be added.
Also, support for searching in multiple address books will be implemented, the RSS component will receive support for internationalized domain name URLs, OAuth2 support for GMail accounts will be added, the users will be able to add a reading position marker like to mail conversations and the columns in the folder pane will become expandable. Via the integration with the Lighting extension, the users will get better calendaring functionality.
If anything goes well, Thunderbird 38 will be released on the 12th of May, along with Firefox 38.
Installation instructions:
Those who want to test the new features of Thunderbird 38, can follow the below instructions and install Thunderbird 38 Beta 4 on their Linux system.
Because Thunderbird 38 Beta 4 is already precompiled, the following instructions are generical and should work on all the major Linux systems, including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pinguy OS, Elementary OS, Deepin, Peppermint, LXLE, Linux Lite, Debian, SparkyLinux, Robolinux, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mageia, OpenMandriva, Arch Linux and Manjaro.
How to install Thunderbird 38 Beta 4 on 32 bit Linux systems:
$ wget https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/38.0b4/linux-i686/en-US/thunderbird-38.0b4.tar.bz2
$ tar -xjvf thunderbird-38.0b4.tar.bz2
$ sudo rm -rf /opt/thunderbird*
$ sudo mv thunderbird /opt/thunderbird.beta
$ sudo ln -sf /opt/thunderbird.beta/thunderbird /usr/bin/thunderbird
To start Thunderbird 38 beta, just open a terminal, type thunderbird and hit enter.
How to install Thunderbird 38 Beta 4 on 64 bit Linux systems:
$ wget https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/38.0b4/linux-x86_64/en-US/thunderbird-38.0b4.tar.bz2
$ tar -xjvf thunderbird-38.0b4.tar.bz2
$ sudo rm -rf /opt/thunderbird*
$ sudo mv thunderbird /opt/thunderbird.beta
$ sudo ln -sf /opt/thunderbird.beta/thunderbird /usr/bin/thunderbird
To start Thunderbird 38 Beta, just open a terminal, type thunderbird and hit enter.
Note: This will replace the version of Thunderbird you have already on your system with Thunderbird 38 Beta.
