How to install Thunderbird 3.1.1 from PPAs

The latest version of Thunderbird, the popular email client developed by Mozilla, is now available. This release fixes several detected issues that can cause security and stability issues, as well as introduces various user interface-related improvements.

What is Thunderbird?

Mozilla Thunderbird is the email manager developed by Mozilla, the makers of the well-known Firefox browser.

Its main features include its powerful mail filters, RSS reader and integrated newsgroups, classification of messages by tags, message search history and reading with tabs.

Security is also very important in Mozilla Thunderbird, with anti-fraud protection, spam detection, and automatic updates.

And like Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird supports themes and add-ons, which enhance its appearance and add more features to what already exists, and can be easily customized.

What's new in version 3.1.1

Thunderbird 3.1.1 uses the rendering engine Gecko 1.9.2 to improve code, performance, stability, and web compatibility.

Among the novelties, we can highlight:

• Faster search results. Indexing of messages is now faster and provides users with better search results.
• Quick filter toolbar. New quick filter toolbar that allows you to filter with search terms, tags, favorite messages, address book contacts, new emails and attachments.
• New Migration Assistant. The new Thunderbird Migration Assistant offers users the ability to choose new Thunderbird 3.1 features or keep current features and options.
• Saved file manager, which shows all the files you have downloaded in your email.
• Email account setup wizard. The new Email Account Assistant has a database for configuring email from different providers. So all you have to do is provide your name, email and password to set up a new email account.
• Stability, performance, memory and password management improvements.

For more information about the new features included in Thunderbird 3.1.1, I recommend you read the «releasenotes«.

How to install

Thanks to the excellent blog (in English) WebUpd8, we learned that there is a new PPA repository that includes the latest version of Thunderbird (3.1.1) in its final version (not in the "daily builds") for both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu Lucid.

To add the repository, I opened a terminal and typed:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa: ricotz / ppa && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install thunderbird

If you have previously installed thunderbird, replace the second line with:

sudo apt-get upgrade

Note- This PPA also includes packages for other Ubuntu versions: Maverick (10.10), Lucid (10.04), Karmic (9.10), Jaunty (9.04) and Hardy (8.04).