Thunderbird 1.5 released: spellchecking, scam filter, updating

Thunderbird 1.5 was released last week. Grab it.

Gave it a quick whirl over my last 1.0.6. The first noticeable thing is that it found the Enigmail PGP e-mail plugin version that I was using was not compatible with the new version. Offered to auto-update the plugin version. Worked seamlessly.

In the client UI, not many changes — the only really noticeable one was autocheck-spelling-as-you-type. Went to options to turn it off, I don’t like and use those myself, but I can imagine it’s really useful for many, so go ahead and use. (As with many little things that make your life easier, it may happen I eventually start using autospellers. But the urge hasn’t struck yet.)

One noticeable new feature is the scam warning.

So when you get an email claiming to be from PayPal or eBay or First American Bank or any of the other fine Internet-enabled corporations that grab your cash, TB claims it can detect and spot this. Works adaptively like the junk filter. It started off for me with a false positive, which I guess is better than missing out real threats. I’ve so far classified those as Junk and I get many scams every day, so it will be interesting to see if the scam filter overrides the junk filter or how well it works.