The second, and final, beta release of Mozilla Thunderbird 5.0 has been made available for download.

New features in Thunderbird 5.0 include a revised account creation wizard and new add-ons manager. Bug fixes and interface tweaks round out the changes.

Full release notes for Thunderbird 5 beta 2 can be found at mozillamessaging.com.

Download
Beta builds of anything are not recommended for users unable or unprepared to manage with incomplete, buggy or unstable software.

Should you feel adept enough at coping, the Beta can be downloaded from: -

• mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/early_releases/downloads/

The Mozilla Team also maintain a ‘Thunderbird Beta’ PPA, which provides packages for Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10 and 11.04.

Note that at the time of writing the PPA has not been updated with Thunderbird 5 Beta 2.

Add the following PPA to your Software Sources: -

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-next
• sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install thunderbird