Mozilla officially launched the final release of the Thunderbird 52.0 open-source email, chat, calendar and news client for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows platforms.

Mozilla Thunderbird 52.0 is now the most advanced stable branch of the popular application, used by default in numerous Linux-based operating systems. It has been brought on par with its bigger brother, Mozilla Firefox 52.0, which is an ESR (Extended Support Release) series.

As expected, there are a lot of new features implemented in this major release, and among the ones that caught our attention, we can mention PulseAudio support for playing sound on Linux platforms, the ability to copy the message filter, as well as support for importing settings from Becky! Internet Mail.

It's now possible to like tweets on Twitter and send Direct Messages, the XMPP support was updated with the SASL SCRAM authentication mechanism, along with support for Jabber/XMPP Message Carbons (XEP-280), and it looks like Yahoo! Messenger support was dropped since Yahoo no longer supports the protocol.

Mozilla Thunderbird 52.0 also changes the way images are included in a compose window to improve the interoperability with well-known office suites like LibreOffice and Microsoft Office. It's also no longer possible for images that are hosted on a remote server to be downloaded and attached to a message automatically.

"The way images are included in a compose window has changed. Images are now included as data URIs and not as references to parts of other messages or operating system files. This allows better interoperability with office packages such as MS Office or LibreOffice," read the release notes.

Reply-to headers now ignored when replying to a mailing list

The way replies are sent to a mailing list has also changed in Mozilla Thunderbird 52.0 as Reply-to headers are now being ignored and the reply is sent to the email address in the From header. Moreover, the IMAP caching functionality has been updated to use Mozilla's latest caching technology.

Last but not least, users can create and edit events in a tab in Calendar, the dictionary settings are automatically restored when editing a draft, and Thunderbird now filters emails in IMAP folders read on external devices by default. The folder view arrows were replaced with folder pane toolbar and folder view selector.

Mozilla Thunderbird 52.0 also comes with out-of-the-box support for folders backed by Mbox storage larger than 4GB, and it can be downloaded for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from our website. We recommend updating to this major version as soon as possible. The full changelog is attached below for more details.