Mozilla Thunderbird is currently one of the most widely used email clients, but this popularity doesn't necessarily mean that it is also secure. This statement is also sustained by a recent security flaw discovered in the application that revealed that Thunderbird 2.x and 1.5.x might not protect the users' messages as a successful exploitation of the vulnerability can lead to unauthorized access. Obviously, the parent company Mozilla already investigated the problem and released two new versions of the email client to fix the security issue. You're now advised to update your program to version 2.0 or 1.5.0.12, the latest releases that are 100 percent safe (at least until the security companies discover other flaws).

"Thunderbird shares the browser engine with Firefox and could be vulnerable if JavaScript were to be enabled in mail. This is not the default setting and we strongly discourage users from running JavaScript in mail. Without further investigation we cannot rule out the possibility that for some of these an attacker might be able to prepare memory for exploitation through some means other than JavaScript, such as large images," Mozilla said in a security advisory.

If you want to keep the older version of Thunderbird, no matter the reason, you can protect yourself by disabling the JavaScript from the mail client because the hackers were trying to exploit the flaw with a malicious Java file.

Thunderbird is currently the most popular email client on the Internet because it provides almost the same functionality as its brother Firefox, the browser developed by the same parent company Mozilla. Both applications allow you to add themes, plug-ins and extensions that provide an excellent functionality to the product although some of the users are criticizing the application for too many configuration options. If you want to download the latest version of Mozilla Thunderbird, you can take it straight from Softpedia using this link.