Thunderbird 2.0 Roadmap
Scott MacGregor (12/08/2005)On December 6th, 2004 we released Thunderbird 1.0 and have been overwhelmed with the excitement and interest that has come from the release. We are now turning our focus towards Thunderbird 2.0 including how we are going to get there.
Structure
The 2.0 plan intentionally looks very similar to Firefox 2.0. The work will be divided over two milestones, 1.5 (January 2006) and an unscheduled 2.0 release. All development work will be done on the Mozilla trunk, and these releases will coincide with Gecko version revs.
Milestones
| Milestone | Release Date | Summary |
| 1.0 | 2004-12-06 | Inaugural Release |
| 1.0.2 | 2005-03-15 | Security Update |
| 1.1 Alpha 1 | 2005-06-01 | Non-Feature Complete developer preview release |
| 1.1 Alpha 2 | July 2005 | Non-Feature Complete developer preview release |
| 1.4 Beta 1 Release | September 2005 | Feature Complete general preview release |
| 1.4.1 Beta 2 Release | October 2005 | Feature Complete general preview release |
| 1.5 Release Candidate 1 | November 2005 | First RC |
| 1.5 Release Candidate 2 | Late December 2005 | Second RC |
| 1.5 | January 2006 | Finished 1.5 Release |
| 2.0 | Summer 2006 | Based on Mozilla 1.8 |
| 3.0 | Early 2007 | Based on Mozilla 1.9 |
Thunderbird 1.5
- Inline spell checking (spell as you type)
- Improved spell check engine. Update our version of myspell to the current version used by Open Office.org
- Deleting attachments from e-mail
- Auto Save As Draft
- Phishing Detector: Thunderbird will attempt to detect email scams, warning users before they visit possible Phishing sites
- Improved RSS Support including new subscriptions UI, OPML import, and podcasting
- Software Auto Update
- Options dialog re-organization based on the work being done for Firefox 1.5
- Improved integration with anti-virus applications for POP3 users
- Improved UI for managing SMTP servers
- Support forward and reply from message filters
Thunderbird 2.0
See the Thunderbird Wiki for the latest Thunderbird 2.0 product brainstorming. Please keep in mind that Thunderbird 2.0 will be shipping from the Mozilla 1.8 branch. The features for this release are limited to UI improvements and other ideas which don't require changes to existing APIs.On Release Dates...
Dates shown above are tentative and serve only to give you an idea of the relative position of one release from another. They represent our current state of thinking as to the release dates at the time this document was last updated, and may have changed since then.
Localization
As with 1.0, all releases moving forward will be available in as many languages as can be made ready at the time of release. Localizers and others dependent on release timing should use this document as an indicator of the up-to-date release time.