Spicebird Mail Client finally swoops out of Beta

icon64 (1)Personal Information Manager & Mail client Spicebird has finally emerged from beta with the release of version 0.8 and, form hereon in, the development team will €œcontinue to update Spicebird every couple of months€ Spicebird developer Abhishek Dastidar has informed us.


Spicebird, based on the popular Mozilla PIM application Thunderbird, not only makes use of the stability offered by latest Thunderbird release but also adds refinements to the various features that make Spicebird 'Spicebird'.

Users will find 0.8 has resolved issues with Instant Messaging, the calendar has received due improvements, full indexing of messages makes searching across accounts easier and support for advanced filtering. The UI of the latest Spicebird also remains consistent with the previous version €œso users don’t feel uncomfortable with the changes.€

On dropping the beta tag & adding Messaging Menu integration

On dropping the Beta tag Synovel's Abhishek Dastidar told me: €œWe made some stable progress in the IM section which was kind of unstable in the 0.7 series. Also, 0.7 was based on TB3Beta3 series which is why we chose to retain the beta tag. Lastly, we did some fixes to the lightning/Calendaring code to make “it work” with real calendaring servers.

I also took the time to ask Abhishek whether adding support for an Indicator Applets or integration with the Ubuntu Messaging Menu was on the cards: -


€œSuch an indicator would have to be designed at the platform level. The current code is based on mozilla 191 which has sparse support. As we sync our code to mozilla 192(TB3.1) and later; you can expect gnome specific changes. As far as Ubuntu Menus are concerned, I am packaging them in my PPA with spicebird-gnome-support.€

Download

Spicebird 0.8 rock up in the official Spicebird PPA very shortly, in the mean time – for th impatient – you can download version 0.8 from the Spicebird website as a .tar.gz file.

http://www.spicebird.com/download

Related posts:

  1. Emesene 1.6.1 released; still the best msn client for linux
  2. Is Spicebird The Best Desktop E-Mail Client?
Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.
  • Bill

    cool. never hurts to try something new. although, i doubt it’ll even come close to thunderbird, but you never know =/

  • http://twitter.com/Herr_Gabriel Gabriel Shahzad

    So this is basically Thunderbird with a different name? Didn’t try it, so please correct me if I’m wrong.

    • Mohan

      No you aren’t wrong, but I like to think of it as Thunderbird with vitamins in it. :)

    • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

      I haven’t tried Thunderbird 3 but Spicebird was always very different in terms of UI to TB – it has a built in IM client, calendar,contact book, support for igoogle gadgets on the ‘start tab etc

    • http://el-bhm.myopenid.com/ el-bhm

      It’s more or less like Thunderbird(or rather Postbox)+Lightning add-on.
      I really liked it but it had so much problems I dropped it at first try.

    • http://el-bhm.myopenid.com/ el-bhm

      It’s more or less like Thunderbird(or rather Postbox)+Lightning add-on.
      I really liked it but it had so much problems I dropped it at first try.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/R25APX2NWD4262MDEYS2BWWEZU Mikolaj

    This is one of the biggest issues with those Ubuntu indicators, not only are they ugly but they require additional work on part of application’s devs…

  • AW

    Never heard of this until today… maybe some intro text next time, eh d00d?

  • AW

    Never heard of this until today… maybe some intro text next time, eh d00d?