Webware

One of the better Mozilla Thunderbird extensions is ThunderBrowse, which allows users to quickly open e-mailed links in a browser window built into the e-mail client itself. The latest version introduces support for the Thunderbird-derived Postbox, as well as compatibility fixes for the Thunderbird 3 beta builds and a new click engine.

ThunderBrowse now offers tab support in Thunderbird.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

However, for users who haven't checked out or updated ThunderBrowse in awhile, there's a lot to play with. Through the expansive options menu, you can configure links to open in new tabs. This allows your original e-mail to stay open in one tab, while the link has been opened in a new one. Unfortunately, in the Thunderbird 3 betas, this does not open a new Thunderbird tab--you'll only get a new ThunderBrowse tab in your message pane. Even if the pane is maximized or the message has been open in a new tab, you'll find a slightly cumbersome new tab bar opening beneath the URL bar.

Other new or recently added options in ThunderBrowse include customizing an external browser to open e-mailed links that's different from your system's default browser, greater control over behavior after left-clicking and scroll wheel-clicking links, and enhanced user security through permission control for JavaScript, images, plug-ins, and cookies. There's also a new auto-complete feature and the ability to move the ThunderBrowse URL bar to the bottom of the pane.

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.

FeedDemon 3 will synchronize your feeds with Google Reader.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

RSS aggregator FeedDemon and e-mail client Postbox both have released recent updates to their not-quite-ready for prime-time programs.

FeedDemon 3.0.0.20 beta 5a continues to build out the feature set of the popular RSS and Atom feed manager. FeedDemon 3 is shaping up to be a must-grab improvement on the last stable release, version 2.7.

FeedDemon 3 is able to synchronize feeds not only with FeedDemon's own Web site, NewsGator, for online news reading, but it can also talk to Google Reader. I jumped away from Google Reader because at the time it was sluggish and I wanted to get my podcasts out of my music jukebox, but I've always regretted losing the convenience of having my e-mail and my RSS reader online and smoothly talking to one another. Google Reader integration means that users will have more flexibility in how they use the program and should broaden its appeal. Beta 5 synchronizes Google Reader and FeedDemon tags as well as the feeds themselves.

FeedDemon 3 comes with a slight interface refresh, too, although it's mostly done in service to the new features. The aforementioned tagging is new, bringing a bit of modern convenience to those who use keywords. Sharing has been made easier with a new Share icon, and shortened URLs such as bit.ly or TinyURL support mouse-over tooltips now.

This is becoming a must-have security feature as phishing attacks adapt to more pernicious methods, and works well in FeedDemon 3's stronger support for Twitter. Author names, replies, and hashtags are automatically linked, and profile pictures also appear. Fun stats such as how many unread items and how many flagged items you've got are surfaced, too.

If you do decide to try out the FeedDemon beta, back up the current version first. Go to File, Manage Cache, Backup, and create a back up folder to deposit the backups in. Full release notes for v3.0.0.20 beta 5a can be read here.

Postbox beta 12 for Windows and Mac updates the well-received remix of Mozilla's Thunderbird. New features include search suggestions when you're typing and smoother integration of folder search with global search. Switching between the two is now marginally simpler. The inspector pane on the right side of a message has been tweaked, as well. Sender details, image thumbnails and dimensions, and the revamped search options for messages, images, links, and attachments have been rolled into the pane.

Mac users should find better support for native Mac address books and Growl notifications. Firefox 3.0.10 bug-fixes have also been integrated into this version of Postbox.

Postbox beta 12 is a small update overall, but because of the bug- and security-fixes that have been implemented I'd strongly recommend upgrading. Full release notes are 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.

Postbox is a new cross platform e-mail client for Windows and Mac computers. It's an alternative to Microsoft Outlook, and manages to bring some of the benefits of Web e-mail to a desktop application.

Things like a conversation view, tagging, and search that indexes both mail and attachments are all features Gmail users have been enjoying for years. The problem is, those features and several others have not gone over to the desktop side of things without additional software plug-ins from third-party providers.

Postbox answers that by taking many of these single features sought after by other third-party developers and blending them into a standalone client. For example, if it sees an address it will pull up a quick map link complete with business information. When you're offline you still get this information.

As some of the session judges at the TechCrunch50 conference noted, some of the things this product does would be much better suited as an extension to the software e-mail client you're already using. I'd certainly love the photo browsing client and conversation view in my Outlook, but I definitely can't ditch it until this product gets rock solid Microsoft Exchange support with a built-in calendar (a feature the product does not have).

Postbox currently works with IMAP, POP, and SMTP protocols, letting you tie in your Web mail accounts. Unless your business is running off Google apps this probably won't be a good companion for anything besides your personal accounts. That said, compared with something like Apple's Mail application, it looks like a nice step up.

Update: Postbox will be available for download in "a few weeks" time. Only the sign-ups were opened up today. I've also thrown in another screenshot after the jump.

(Credit: Postbox, Inc. / CBS Interactive)