There's a new release of Thunderbird Conversations out there waiting for you to give it a try! (Pending review from the AMO team). Thunderbird Conversations is an addon for Thunderbird that enables a conversation view in the style of Gmail. You can read more about it in our introductory blog post

There have been numerous improvements since the last release, and this will be the last alpha. The software is stable enough so that I can start labeling the builds as "beta". There might be a feature or two coming up (we're thinking about forwarding an entire conversation, in a nice HTML formatting), but that's pretty much all. If you want to share your thoughts, we'd be happy to hear about your feedback on the google groups thread.

The Gallery View This small link will show up if the message you're viewing contains any attached images.

Notable improvements include:

  • conversation tabs will stay there, even if you close Thunderbird,
  • we now have a new gallery view,
  • support for marking a message as junk from the conversation UI,
  • support for phishing warnings,
  • support for Lightning events notifications (thanks go to Fallen),
  • several improvements to the quick reply,
  • fixed bugs in the setup assistant.

Just click this button to open the conversation in a new tab This is the button that will allow you to open the conversation in a new tab. This allows you to have more space to read message, and you can also resize the quick reply area to have more space for replying.

There's also support for spell checking the quick reply, thanks to a series of patches I committed to Thunderbird. To set the language, just right-click in the quick reply area, and pick the language you want.

Spell checking support Spell checking is controlled by the context menu (right-click on the quick reply area), just like in Firefox.

As a side note, all of you who were running Thunderbird Conversations 2.0 alpha 2 should definitely check their preferences: there's a checkbox that the setup assistant used to disable in 2.0 alpha 2. This is not necessary anymore, so you should revert the change. To do so, just go to Preferences > Advanced > Reading and display, and check that "Automatically mark as read" has the value you want it to be.

As usual, the juicy bits are on GitHub. Come over there if you wish to contribute!