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Since we're past feature freeze does that mean that there will be no more efforts into integration of Thunderbird and Unity?

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    Good question. The present state of affairs is quite confusing, with both Evolution ad Thunderbird installed and competing. I really hope it'll get integrated in 11.10, but if not, then switching to thunderbird should be postponed to 12.04, I think. – Jo-Erlend Schinstad Aug 25 '11 at 20:19
  • After reading this I kind of understand the feature would be on the lightning add-on side; so it would not be affected by feature freeze – danjjl Aug 26 '11 at 21:01
  • Well, I'd imagine that if lightning would be included by default then it might be frozen, too. Sort of like how Thunderbird itself (used to be) frozen on the specific version that was on freeze (natty is still on TB 3). –  Aug 27 '11 at 04:24
  • As Evolution is not installed by default in 12.04, this is still an issue and the workaround (link) is now way to much hassle for the average user as it needs Evolution in between Thunderbird and the Calendar. Hopefully it will be soon easier to integrate "cloud" calendars like Google Calendar and the Lightning calendar directly to the Unity calendar, and make them work altogether. – stragu Apr 02 '12 at 04:10

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According to this article, Thunderbird has already achieved complete integration with all of the special menu schemes in Unity. Even if 11.10 ships without complete integration, it shouldn't be any trouble to add it in yourself. You'll either be able to manually modify it, or add in a Mozilla PPA which includes a post-feature-freeze version of Thunderbird and Lightning.

It's already quite possible to add Thunderbird to the time/date indicator in Ubuntu: these instructions will take you through it step by step. They also explains how to thoroughly integrate Thunderbird with your Ubuntu desktop.

Since we're in feature freeze, there aren't likely to be major changes to the calendar indicator design before 11.10. This should make it easier for the Thunderbird developers (and independent add-on developers) to update their Unity-ready addons for 11.10. If you're looking for other unity-specific ways to make Thunderbird play nice with Ubuntu check out these three addons:

Note that they may become unnecessary, if Mozilla continues to add Ubuntu/Unity functionality directly into Thunderbird. This AskUbuntu answer gives some other ways that you can customize your Unity Thunderbird launcher.

If you're feeling particularly adventurous, and want to try out the latest and greatest versions of Thunderbird right now, you can try out one of the Mozilla personal package archives:

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