Of course there is thunderbird-3.1 in Ubuntu Mozilla Daily Builds but it's a very old alpha version that never got updated.
Fortunately, I just found about the Ubuntuzilla repository, it has .deb packages for the binaries published by Mozilla for Firefox, Seamonkey and Thunderbird. This repository is now tracked by UbuntuUpdates.org at Ubuntuzilla.
Things to be aware of:
- This is 32-bit only.
- The Ubuntuzilla binaries are installed under /opt, they don't replace the official Ubuntu binaries for Thunderbird except that /usr/bin/thunderbird gets renamed to /usr/bin/thunderbird.ubuntu and that a symlink is created from /usr/bin/thunderbird to /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird.
- The Ubuntuzilla packages come with all the dependencies they need. All libraries from libssl to libldap are part of the packages and are installed under /opt/thunderbird for example. This way the packages are compatible with any version of Ubuntu.
- The Thunderbird profile directory from the official Ubuntu installation is reused.
- Addons for the new version get updated automatically.
- Gnome interaction is okay but font smoothing is imperfect.
- You may or may not like the new search boxes: there are now 2 of
them, the first one at the top is always visible and uses the main
Thunderbird search engine. The other one can be toggled ON or OFF and
correspond to the search box there was in Thunderbird 2: search
subject, sender or recipient. For me, this latter form of search
resolved 95% of my problems and it's much faster than the new search
engine. I also regret the lost vertical space due to the superposition
of 2 search boxes.
