How to Install Thunderbird 6.0 (beta) in Ubuntu Linux 11.04, 10.10 and 10.04?

Thunderbird, the free and one of the most popular email clients in the world will also receive rapid updates (new versions) in a much quicker cycle simultaneously with the Firefox Web browser which is obviously "inspired" by the Google Chrome, after seeing its success, I guess.

The current version of the Thunderbird email client is 5.0 which brought some major changes (Mozilla Gecko 5 engine), faster start up times, etc and was introduced very recently. But, even though the next upcoming version 6.0 is still at beta stage but thanks to the Ubuntu Mozilla team we can already install the 6.0 beta version in Ubuntu quite easily nonetheless. 

Since it's still in the beta stage there's nothing much to say about it but according to their release note page, it brings few new features such as ...

*. Added the support for Windows 7 Jump list support (which is very similar to the application menu indicator in Ubuntu) ... so you can access some of the main options of Thunderbird from the task-bar while minimized.

*. Few MS Outlook e-mail importing issues fixed.

*. Now has the ability to check whether it's the default e-mail client in GNU/Linux environment (pity actually... I mean, Mozilla is a GNU/GPL licensed application/community yet it took them this long to arrive at this).

As usual this beta release includes few bug fixes and few other GUI improvements and enhancements as well.

You can install Thunderbird 6.0 beta in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04 by using the dedicated PPA channel. So as usual, just open your Terminal window and enter the below commands.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-next

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install thunderbird

But remember this is still in its beta stage so if you're concerned about the best possible level of security in your email client software, then you'd better off with the version 5 instead. Enjoy!.