stuart test blog

Just noticed that Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 1 has also been released so I’ve downloaded and installed it and will give it a good testing over the next couple of weeks. First impressions:

• Offline support has been removed from the installation options, this is now part of the standard build
• Product version shows up as Thunderbird 1.4 after installation – this must be an internal product version.
• Options dialog is the same as the new Firefox beta 1, with the category icons at the top of the box.
• New feature – Spell as you type. Works very well, leaves a faint, dotted, red line beneath incorrectly spelled words – right-clicking the word presents the choices of new words.
• While testing the new spelling feature, I downloaded the English (New Zealand) dictionary which comes in the form of an XPI extension. Interestingly, after installing the extension using the Extensions dialog box, Thunderbird didn’t need to be restarted for it to take effect. I wonder if Firefox works like this too..?
• New feature – Email scams. “Thunderbird can analyze messages for possible email scams by looking for common techniques used to deceive you.” I guess this is also know as anti-phishing…
• New feature – Anti-virus. “Thunderbird can make it easy for anti-virus software to analyze incoming mail messages for viruses before they are stored locally.” This sounds like an interesting new feature, not sure how it would work though?

Wow – some excellent new features in there and that was only after 10 minutes of poking around!