Following the release of Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of their email client: Thunderbird. Now along with E-mails, you will be able to chat with your online buddies right from the application. For the time being, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, IRC, Twitter and XMPP/Jabber are supported. You can read about the configuration instructions from here.

Apart from this major update, some other changes in this release are:

• several security improvements, including 5 critical ones that can allow a remote hacker to execute code on hosts machine
• Full support for Do Not Track header that will drastically improve users' privacy.
• A new menu and toolbar design
• Filelink and YouSentIt updated
• Support for Ubuntu One cloud storage platform.

Mozilla had earlier announced plans of slowing giving away Thunderbird development to the community. Currently features developed earlier are being implemented while The Mozzilla Foundation will fully give away Thunderbird development by Thunderbird 17.

For RPM based distros, you can install the latest Thunderbird by running the this command in terminal.

yum - enablerepo = remi update thunderbird \ *