Mozilla Thunderbird Offers Unique Email Domains, Works with Big Files

This week, Mozilla released new versions of Mozilla Thunderbird, its free and open source email application, for Windows, the Mac, and Linux. The new version 13 of Thunderbird offers some major improvements, most notably the ability to register personal email domains. Previously, if you wanted to have an email address such as Frank@geniuswork.com, Thunderbird couldn't handle the task of personalizing the domain part of the address. Mozilla has solved the problem by working with hosting services Hover and Gandi.

According to the Thunderbird blog:

"Our two partners are based Europe and North America respectively. Anyone can sign up with either company, but if you want a specific country domain (such as “.us” or “.com”), select the provider in your geographic area. We are working with additional suppliers to cover more areas of the world and to provide more options in future."

Here's another major attraction in Thunderbird 13: Previously, the email client presented a lot of problems working with large files, but the new version handles them efficiently (though it is done through a partnership), as noted here: 

"We have added completely new options for large files sharing! You can now speed up the transfer of large documents by uploading them to an online storage provider and sharing the link instead of sending the file directly as a message attachment. Improve the speed of sending email and avoid message rejection if the recipient’s server disallows large files. As an added bonus, you’ll also save space in your sent folder and the recipient’s inbox. Rather than embedding attachments in your message, Thunderbird Filelink uploads the file to your private online storage account and inserts a link to the file in your message. The recipient can then click on the link and download the file. YouSendIt is our launch partner but additional partners will be added in the near future."

I use YouSendIt all the time, especially for sending very large video files to others. It sounds like if you very frequently send very large files, you'll need to pay for YouSendIt's services, but the service does work extremely well, and Thunderbird sounds like it will work with these services seamlessly.

To get the latest versions of Thunderbird for Windows, Mac or Linux download Thunderbird from http://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/all.html or go into the About dialog in a currently installed version to check which one you have.