Mozilla Released Thunderbird 1.0

The Mozilla Foundation (www.mozilla.org), a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet, today announced the worldwide availability of the Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 email client.

"Thunderbird 1.0 marks another successful product milestone for the Mozilla Foundation, made possible by hundreds of community volunteers and developers around the world," commented Mitchell Baker, president of the Mozilla Foundation. "Thunderbird is the perfect companion to Firefox and demonstrates another success of the open source development model."

Thunderbird focuses on new features and settings to help stop spam and prevent viruses, the two biggest problems facing email users today. Mozilla Thunderbird follows last month's highly successful release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0 that has been downloaded by over nine million users.

Today's announcement marks the immediate availability of Thunderbird 1.0 for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux-as a free download from mozilla.org and by CD from the Mozilla Store. Thunderbird is now available in English, German, Greek, and Turkish with more languages on the way.

Research firms estimate that fighting junk mail and viruses are costing billions of dollars each year. "We think people will benefit from our adaptive junk mail filters in addition to new features like saved search folders and RSS integration," said Scott MacGregor, lead engineer for Thunderbird. "We view Thunderbird as a big step towards providing people with a better email experience."

With thousands of technology contributors and advocates engaged in the development, documentation, testing and marketing of Mozilla Thunderbird, a rich ecosystem of support resources and tools is available. Online documentation, tutorials, FAQs and links to commercial support partners are available online at www.mozilla.org.