Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition 2.0.0.18 Revision 2 Released

John T. Haller's picture
Submitted by John T. Haller on November 21, 2008 - 4:06pm

Thunderbird logoMozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition 2.0.0.18 Revision 2 has been released in English, Italian, German, French, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. It's the popular Mozilla Thunderbird email client bundled with a PortableApps.com launcher as a portable app. This minor update fixes a bug where multilingual extensions would show up in English within non-English packages of Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition. It's packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Suite. And it's open source and completely free.

Read on for more details...

Features

portable_thunderbird_small.pngMozilla Thunderbird is the safe, fast email client that's easy to use. It has lots of great features including quick message search, customizable views, support for IMAP/POP, RSS support and more. Plus, the portable version leaves no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, so you can take your email and adress book with you wherever you go. Learn more about Mozilla Thunderbird...

New In This Release

In addition to the 2.0.0.18 updates (included Thunderbird updated to 2.0.0.18 (release notes), launcher updated to improve cleanup of empty profile/profiles directories and unreadmail keys that were previously deleted and installer now preserves any installed GPG binaries) this revision fixes an issue where non-English packages would display multilingual extensions in English. The English build has just had a version update to keep it consistent with the other builds. Users of the English package do not need to upgrade from 2.0.0.18.

GPG 1.4.9

GPG, in conjunction with the Enigmail extension, allows you to sign and encrypt your email. Learn more about GPG and Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition.

PortableApps.com Installer / PortableApps.com Format

Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition is packaged in a PortableApps.com Installer so it will automatically detect an existing PortableApps.com installation when your drive is plugged in. It supports upgrades from Thunderbird Portable 1.5 & 2.0 by installing right over an existing copy, preserving all your email and settings. And it's in PortableApps.com Format, so it automatically works with the PortableApps.com Suite including the Menu and Backup Utility.

Download

Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition is available for immediate download from the Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition homepage. You can get the German release from the German homepage and the French, Italian, Japanese and Simplified Chinese releases from the Localization page. Get it today!

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Comments

.. instead of having the Portable Apps menu with different package configurations, how about having some useful add-on's such as thunderbrowse etc.

John T. Haller's picture

You can't distribute Thunderbird with extensions preloaded. And the end user can just as easily add them to the portable version as they can to the local version.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Is this to do with GPL or would all those other devs need to be onboard, I'm supposing the former.

John T. Haller's picture

It's to do with licensing. We have an agreement with Mozilla making it legal for us to package our portable versions and use their trademarks. But it doesn't allow for extensions (which makes sense as they want a consistent end user experience).

Plus, it goes against one of our goals which is to keep the portable versions close to the local versions mainly only making changes that enhance portability. Rarely we'll venture further (see CoolPlayer) in which case we made it clear with a slight name change and making it clear on the app homepage.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Simeon's picture

the License agreement PortableApps.com (John T. Haller) has with Mozilla. And the normal version doesn't have any extensions preloaded, so why should we?

EDIT: John was faster Smile

"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate

The Mozilla community just started to offer packages of selected extensions, many more will follow:
http://fashionyourfirefox.com/

If you want to participate, just suggest user-generated extension packs, for example like a shopping basket in the current AMO (addons.mozilla.org) user interface.
Contact AMO through the Wiki / IRC
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Update
or on a blog, i.e.
http://blog.mozilla.com/basil/2008/08/04/amo-roadmap-directions-firefox-...

Or start a community project on
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/

MarkoMLM's picture

... the fix works fine.
Extensions (including enigmail) are localised again and GPG is alive Wink

Paid for Software more or less?
What You need is OSS!

In the 2.0.0.18 releases, the unreadmail keys are still being left behind when they didn't exist at the start.

This still happening for anyone else?

the portugese lang pack is available here.

"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate

The offline features in this release are severely broken. How do we report bugs? Also, how do we downgrade to an earlier version? The download page only lists the current version, without any links to the previous versions.

Ray