How to Install Thunderbird 5 (beta) in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

Apart from the Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird is the other widely used GNU e-mail client/application from the Mozilla foundation. Although you won't get Thunderbird as the default e-mail client in Ubuntu but you can install it nonetheless. If however you install it from the official repositories then you won't be getting the latest beta version (5) which was released few days ago and some of the new features as well.

Although you certainly won't be having a huge list of cool new features and if you don't like to use a beta channel then you should just stick to the stable release. But for some reason they've skipped the version "4" and jumped to the "5" instead and it does bring few improvements nonetheless.

*. New addon and extension manager API (when they release it officially they'll be changing the GUI as well).

*. Easily drag tabs from one window to the other.

*. Enhanced setting up wizard.

Image via: ubuntuforums

*. Attached file sizes are shown alongside them.

*. Better troubleshooting.

*. Load plugins within RSS Feeds.

*. And few other bug fixes and minor improvements.

You can install Thunderbird 5.0 beta in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10, 10.04 or in the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha by entering the below command in your Terminal (we're using the Mozilla's official PPA channel).

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

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install thunderbird

That should do it.