The Download Blog

As the social-networking e-mail client Postbox approaches its announced general release date at the beginning of September, the cross-platform program updates with what looks to be more a "tidying-up" release. Available for Windows and Mac, Postbox 1.0 beta 15 introduces a new version of the Thunderbird calendar plug-in Lightning, improved contact searching, and other performance tweaks--but not much else.

Installing Postbox may require a reboot.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Derived from Mozilla Thunderbird, Postbox beta 15 will also let you drag and drop e-mails from one account to another and introduces a crash reporter that had been strangely missing until now. Search queries that return no results will now suggest alternative search terms, and more plug-ins have been ported over from Thunderbird, including ThunderBrowse, Virtual Identities, and support for Mozilla-client profile rescuer MozBackup. Frustratingly, Postbox now requires a reboot to work--at least, it did on upgrading my installation from beta 14.

The full changelog can be read here.

Postbox's latest update builds on the add-on functionality that was introduced in the previous beta, supporting Thunderbird's calendar plug-in Lightning, among others, and also comes with an announcement that the days of Postbox-for-free are coming to a end.

Postbox beta 14 for Windows and Mac has its own build of Lightning, which should allow users to communicate with both local and networked calendars. While Lightning works perfectly for me in Thunderbird, it wasn't able to talk to CNET's Microsoft Exchange server in Postbox. The Provider for Google Calendar plug-in, which gives users bi-directional Google Calendar access, works fine in Postbox--albeit with a slight hiccup when first loading the calendar.

Postbox gets it's own version of Lightning in beta 14, but it's still a bit buggy.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Postbox now natively supports Gmail-style conversation threading and e-mail message counts. So if you've got a collapsed thread, where you can only see one message, there will now be a number next to it telling you how many unread messages are in the thread. Unfortunately, when I clicked on the first message, even if it had already been marked as read, it automatically marked all the unread messages in the thread as read, too.

There's a new Contacts sidebar, although the old Address Book is still available by hitting CTRL+2 or going through the Tools menu. The new Web services option, also available from the Tools menu or the Advanced Settings tab under Options, gives you more granular control over which Web services you're logged into through Postbox. This is useful if Postbox isn't your main Twitter manager, so you can keep your API count from exploding and preventing tweet updates.

Postbox Inc. also announced that they're expecting to take the program to a premium-only status in early September, when the program graduates from beta development. A single-user license will cost $39.95, with a family pack option consisting of licenses for five people living at the same address costing an additional $19.95. A lifetime upgrades option can be bought for another $24.95. These prices are currently discounted for a beta sale good until August 31, at $29.95, $9.95, and $19.95 respectively.

Postbox isn't the only Mozilla-based software to charge for downloading, but the list of programs that do isn't exactly long. Rafael Ebron, spokesman for Mozilla Messaging, pointed out that some of them include TuneUpTwitFactory.

The full list of Postbox extensions is available here, and release notes for Postbox beta 14 are available here.

Considering that it's based on Mozilla Thunderbird, it was a bit of a surprise that add-ons weren't available for Postbox when it debuted. That's now been remedied in Postbox beta 13 for Windows and Mac. Given Postbox's emphasis on social-networking technology and Mozilla's own success with add-ons, this move puts the e-mail client in an excellent position to attract more users.

The latest Postbox introduces add-ons to its users.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

A Webware 100 winner, the list of supported extensions isn't long at the moment, and notably it doesn't include Thunderbird's calendaring tool Lightning. Since Postbox doesn't have its own supported calendar, this could prove to be a deal breaker for some. However, the list does include several plug-ins that Thunderbird users should be familiar with, including ReminderFox, QuickText, and MinimizeToTray. MozBackup and Zindus are listed as "coming soon." There's new support for localized dictionaries from Mozilla, too.

Users who wish to install Postbox add-ons while running Firefox can either save the XPI file to their desktop and then install it manually, or drag-and-drop it into Postbox's open Add-ons window.

Other changes include fetching profile pictures from your address books in Postbox, Mac OS X, Twitter, and Facebook for the Inspector Pane. Settings can be imported from Mail.app. Multiple attachments can be dragged to your desktop. Along with a large number of stability and usability fixes, the security improvements made to Firefox 3.0.10 have also been folded in. Full release notes can be read here.

If you've been playing around with the Postbox e-mail client for Windows and Mac, beta 11 has been unleashed upon the world.

Unlike March's beta 10, though, this update includes more performance issue fixes than anything else. Still, it's probably a good idea to upgrade.

Most notably, memory and CPU usage have decreased. Postbox claims that indexing is three times faster in this version, compared to beta 10, and that indexing uses about 75 percent to 80 percent less memory than before. I don't have statistics to do my own comparison of beta 10 to beta 11, but I did notice empirical improvements in performance.

AOL Mail account support has been added, and a bug in importing data from Outlook Express has been fixed. There's also support for usernames with special characters, and you can now add a contact to your address book with one click from the contact panel.

Beyond those changes, the full list is made up mostly of fixing annoyances such as LDAP and IMAP connections hanging.

Postbox had problems accepting a change in my network password from the last time I used it, when I had to re-enter it four times before the program remembered it. This probably has to do with how the program talks to the Exchange server, but it was irritating nonetheless. Thunderbird, on which Postbox is based, required my new network password to be entered only once.

Postbox is a finalist for 2009's Webware 100, awarded by CNET.

The open-source and cross-platform e-mail client Postbox rolls out another beta and has been quickly adding muscle to its abilities.

Postbox beta 10 introduces an HTML signature-creator in the Compose window.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Based on Mozilla Thunderbird and currently available for Windows and Mac, Postbox beta 10--the third update since I checked out the program for in the beginning of February--introduces several small changes worth noting.

Since then, Postbox has seen Hotmail support, Flickr integration in the Compose window, and a host of bug-fixes including two Firefox security updates. In the most recent version, users get the ability to create and edit HTML signatures from the Compose Sidebar's Signature panel and improved calendar attachment detection.

There's also a fix for the spell checker, which had been marking contractions as misspelled words, and a new feature that prevents a message from being marked as read until it's been viewed in the preview pane for a specific minimum time.

One feature that I've just noticed is that the Message pane lets you highlight text, which you can then drag into the search bar. Once you release it, Postbox will open up a search results page in your browser for the highlighted term.

These features continue to improve on the Postbox experience. Without support for extensions and the Thunderbird calendar extension Lightning, though, and keeping in mind Postbox's social-networking friendliness, it'd be interesting to see baked-in support for a Web-based calendar as an alternative to this major and missing feature.

There aren't a lot of Microsoft Outlook competitors out there, but Mozilla's open-source Thunderbird is one of the best. Postbox for Windows and Mac, and built on Thunderbird code the way that Flock is based on Firefox, is a new face on the e-mail field.

Postbox looks like Thunderbird, but offers a lot of Web 2.0 features.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Still in beta, Postbox takes desktop e-mail hard toward Web 2.0, with fast links to upload contacts to Facebook and pictures to Picasa. Click on an e-mail, and the preview pane not only shows the text, but extracts all links, images, other attachments, and contacts into a sidebar for easy management. Postbox is also obsessed with tabs, which are coming in Thunderbird 3.0 but not to this degree--at least not from what we've seen. Postbox can also upload to Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace, del.icio.us, and Google.

When Postbox starts, you can import e-mail, contacts, and other messaging data from Thunderbird, Outlook, Google, and Yahoo. Once you get going, Postbox's tabs can be used to filter out the text of a message and focus on only attachments, images, links, or contacts. Messages themselves can also be opened in new tabs, cutting down on the excessive clutter that Web mail eliminated ages ago.

An excellent remix of a Thunderbird feature is Topics. An expansion of Thunderbird's Labels that automatically searches across folders for messages tagged with the same Topic, Postbox's is undeniably what its progenitor's should have been. Thunderbird's Labels can be configured to behave the same way, but it's not done without extra effort.

The Compose Sidebar pulls contacts, links, images, and attachments into a separate pane.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Postbox doesn't feature all of Thunderbird's abilities. The biggest one missing is that add-ons have been killed. So while Thunderbird 2.0 can be given calendaring via the Lightning plug-in, and Thunderbird 3.0 will integrate Lightning natively, Postbox only has a To-Do list. Depending on what you're using your e-mail for, this may be a major drawback, or much ado about nothing.

Social-networking junkies who are looking for a desktop solution should take a good look at Postbox, or at least keep an eye on its progress. Support for Flickr is hopefully coming, and I'm interested in seeing how Postbox reacts once Thunderbird 3 finally leaves beta later this year, but Postbox is proof that alternative desktop e-mail clients are far from dead.

The Lightning add-on for the open-source e-mail client Thunderbird (for Windows and Mac) updates officially to Version 0.9, and Mozilla promises that it will be the last one before it's rolled into Thunderbird 3.0.

Lightning provides Thunderbird with calendaring and e-mail-invitation abilities.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

This update doesn't introduce quite as many new features as the last one did, but there are still plenty of major changes. Interface enhancements include a visual indicator for events that span multiple days, an overhaul of both the "minimonth" calendar in the upper left and the main day/week/multiweek/month calendar views, a progress indicator for when remote calendars are loading, and support for the Today pane in both calendar mode and task mode.

The guts of Lightning have been strengthened, too. CalDAV support and interoperability with CalDAV servers--the bits of the extension that send your calendar data back and forth--have been improved. Support for e-mail invitations, the iMip and iTip, has been improved, too. Although many of the major bugs that afflicted this feature were overcome in v0.8, 0.9 is even better. Also, memory consumption has been reduced, while various leaks have been plugged. Overall, the extension works better than it ever has at calendaring, and is more suitable as an Outlook replacement than it used to be .

For those who use the Lightning nightly builds, these changes are old hat. Except for one glitch that I experienced in August, the nightly builds have been impressively stable--at least for my needs.

You can read the Lightning release notes, and check out Sunbird for Windows and Mac, the stand-alone Mozilla calendar (if you don't use Thunderbird). It sports nearly identical features, except for e-mailing invites.

Lightning makes Thunderbird soar above Outlook for home use, and places it on nearly equal ground in the office. It includes an overhauled interface with easy-to-use buttons for jumping between e-mail and your calendar, LDAP directory support for event invites, and Sun Java Calendar Server support.

Work on the plug-in is now handled by Mozilla as it prepares to integrate its code into Thunderbird for the big Version 3 update coming later this year, but that doesn't mean Lightning isn't ready to be used now. A menu bar for switching between mail and calendar views can live either above or below the folder tree on the left. On the right side of the main pane is a new panel for quickly viewing and managing events and tasks. Events are searchable at the calendar top, and the display of events is highly customizable. Lightning supports multiple calendars, including iCal, and has bidirectional support for Google Calendar with the unfortunately separate Provider for Google Calendar plug-in.

There is also support for Exchange servers, although for enterprise use fans of Thunderbird/Lightning will likely have to talk to the tech support teams to get the servers configured properly. That, of course, is the biggest drawback compared with using Outlook. Old bugs relating to time-zone management and invitation responses have been eliminated, though, making this add-on an absolute requirement for all users, both at home and in the office.

Mozilla's Thunderbird has come into its own with version 2 for Windows, Mac, and in a portable edition. Starring features and innovations that take aim at both Web e-mail clients and industry standards such as Microsoft's Outlook, open-source Thunderbird offers the best of both worlds.

Back and forward buttons, like the ones you have in your Web browser, let you jump through messages in the order that you viewed them. Keep your e-mails organized with tags, even across dozens of message folders. Configuration is as simple as entering your e-mail address and password. Search results can be saved, and Thunderbird has Firefox's extension capability, allowing for user-designed tweaks that greatly enhance the program, including Lightning, which provides calendaring features.

Even when weighed down by multiple folders and RSS feeds, the program loads fast, and the basic feature set remains intact: good junk mail filters, HTML support, multiple identities, and POP, IMAP, and Microsoft Exchange server support. Security features include S/MIME, digital signing, message encryption, and a built-in phishing detector. Flexible, powerful, and lightweight, Thunderbird 2 is an appropriate companion application to Firefox in every way.