Thunderbird Portable 1.5.0.5 & 2.0 Alpha 1 Released

Portable Thunderbird is now Mozilla Thunderbird - Portable Edition (Thunderbird Portable among friends), and version 1.5.0.5 has been released. It's the popular Mozilla Thunderbird email client packaged with a PortableApps.com Launcher as a portable app, so you can take your email and contacts with you. This new release adds in a ton of new features, including: the ability to run from a CD, complete Thunderbird partial update support, in-place upgrades, lots of handy bug fixes, support for running within Wine on *nix and more. It's also available with Enigmail and GPG built in for secure, encrypted email. You can even get a copy of the latest Thunderbird 2.0 Alpha 1 as well. Read on for all the details...

Portable Thunderbird becomes Mozilla Thunderbird - Portable Edition

The first thing you'll notice is that the name has been changed from Portable Thunderbid to Mozilla Thunderbid - Portable Edition (or, Thunderbird Portable, for short). Why the name change? In working closely with Mozilla, we determined that a name that fully respected Mozilla's trademarks and branding was much more in order. The new name is meant to indicate that it is an official copy of Mozilla Thunderbid within and that it includes add-ons by PortableApps.com that allow it to work its best portably.

What's New?

So, what's new...

Live/CD Support - Thunderbid Portable supports running from a CD or other read-only media right out of the box. You just need change one setting to do it, too. Best of all, Thunderbid Portable will even detect if you're running from a read-only location and offer to run locally, which is handy if you have a write-protection switch on your flash drive or memory card. Full details are in the support topic on Running from a CD.

In-Place Upgrades - Thunderbid Portable now supports the ability to do what we're calling an "in-place upgrade". This means that you can extract it right over an existing installation of Thunderbid Portable without losing any of your existing data and it'll Just Work. This will apply to future releases of Thunderbid Portable as you'll still need to manually update due to the directory changes.

Partial Update Support Fixed - Thunderbid Portable now fully supports the ability to use Thunderbid's partial updates. Thunderbird Portable will automatically let you know when an update is available and let you choose when you'd like to install it. This is important, since some flash drives can be very slow, taking several minutes to update. Just be sure you have at least 40mb free on your drive when you do an update, since Thunderbid's update process doesn't yet check for low disk space.

Wine Support in Linux/Debian/Unix - Thunderbid Portable now supports the ability to download, install and run within Wine. That means you can run it right within your *nix of choice without any changes. You can even copy things like your mail back and forth to your local copy of Thunderbid.

Enigmail and GPG Support

In additition to the standard package of Thunderbird Portable, there is also a package with GPG and Enigmail pre-installed. The Enigmail extension allows you to make full use of GnuPG within Thunderbird to authenticate and encrypt your email.

Download a Copy

You can grab a copy of Thunderbird Portable or Thunderbird Portable with Enigmail and GPG from the Thunderbird Portable homepage.