The Mozilla Foundation today announced the release of its next generation email client, Mozilla Thunderbird version 0.6. Thunderbird makes emailing safer, faster and easier than ever before with the industry's best implementations of features such as intelligent spam filters, a built-in spell checker, extension support, and much more.

"This release, with our security and IMAP improvements, marks a big step forward in our efforts to produce a best of breed cross platform e-mail client ready for the enterprise," commented Scott MacGregor, Engineering Lead for Mozilla Thunderbird.

Thunderbird 0.6 packs an array of powerful new features that make email easier to use:

• A new installer for Windows makes it a breeze to start using Thunderbird.
• Improved Junk Mail Controls. Thunderbird’s spam filters, which get smarter as you teach them what is spam and what’s not, have been re-designed to learn faster and catch more spam.
• The Mac OS X version of Thunderbird sports a beautiful new theme that matches the OS X look and feel. The theme, and a spiffy new Thunderbird logo, were created by the Mozilla project’s Visual Identify Team.
• Improved support for IMAP protocol extensions makes Thunderbird the perfect solution for enterprise users, who are already deploying Thunderbird to up to 50,000 users at a time.
• Secure Password Authentication. Thunderbird includes Secure Password Authentication using a new cross-platform NTLM authentication mechanism for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP.

Thunderbird also includes numerous bug fixes and incremental improvements that make 0.6 the most usable and stable version of Thunderbird to date.

Thunderbird is a project of the Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla project is riding a wave of industry, media and end user praise for the Mozilla 1.6 Internet suite and recently released technology previews of the organization’s next generation Mozilla Firefox browser. Approximately 3 million users have downloaded Mozilla Firefox 0.8 since it was released on February 9. The rapidly growing demand for Mozilla applications continues to showcase the innovative capacity and excellence of the open source development model.

Getting Thunderbird
Thunderbird 0.6 may be downloaded at no charge from www.mozilla.org. Alternatively users can purchase a CD edition from the Mozilla Foundation’s web site. Mozilla applications run on a wide range of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and are translated into dozens of languages. The source code and documentation for all Mozilla applications is freely available under the open source Mozilla Public License.