14 DAY TRIAL // Almost all Ubuntu users out there have asked us almost daily when Canonical will upgrade the default and only email client used on their Ubuntu Linux operating systems, Mozilla Thunderbird, to the latest version available.
Some time ago, for an unknown reason to us, Canonical stopped updating the Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird apps in their supported Ubuntu distributions, including Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet), Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin).
A couple of weeks ago, we reported that Canonical upgraded the Mozilla Firefox web browser to version 39.0, the latest stable release, after a long wait. Today, we can announce that the Thunderbird app has been updated as well, but to version 31.8.0, which was officially released by Mozilla on July 15, 2015, and not version 38.1.0, as users expected.
Therefore, Ubuntu Linux remains the only GNU/Linux operating system that is using an older version of Mozilla Thunderbird from the 31.x branch, which apparently is still supported upstream. We have no idea when Canonical will decide to make the big move and upgrade Thunderbird to the 38.x series, but we do hope it will be soon!