thunderbird

thunderbird

Wooden thunderbird of the Haida tribe, northwest coast of North America, 19th century; in the …

(credit: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum)

In North American Indian mythology, a powerful spirit in the form of a bird that watered the earth and made vegetation grow. Lightning was believed to flash from its eyes or beak, and the beating of its wings was thought to represent rolling thunder. The thunderbird was often portrayed with an extra head on its abdomen, particularly on totem poles, and it was frequently accompanied by lesser bird spirits. Though it is best known in North America, evidence of similar figures has been found throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe.

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Thunderbird

(1) A full-featured e-mail client for Windows, Mac and Linux from the Mozilla Foundation. It provides unique features including a Saved Search feature that provides a virtual mailbox based on specific search criteria. For example, all mail from a particular person can be in a Saved Search folder although the physical messages are stored in several other mailboxes.

Like its Firefox Web browser counterpart, Thunderbird also supports "extensions," which are plug-ins that enhance the program. For more information, visit www.mozilla.org. See Firefox and Penelope.

(2) The code name for AMD's 1.1 GHz Athlon processor introduced in August 2000. The L2 die is on cache. See AMD.

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(messaging, open source)

Thunderbird - A complete free, open-source e-mail client from the Mozilla Foundation and therefore a true code descendent of the e-mail code in Netscape Navigator. The first non-beta release was in late 2004. The Firefox web browser is from the same source. Thunderbird Home.