14 DAY TRIAL // After a long wait, Canonical has finally decided that it was time to upgrade the Mozilla Thunderbird software on all of its supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems, where it is used as the default email and news client.
Users have been begging Canonical for the latest Mozilla Thunderbird version on Ubuntu for so long, but the company behind one of the most popular free operating systems kept them in the dark, without giving them a proper answer to why version 45.x of the widely used open-source software was not suitable for supported Ubuntu releases.
Of course, there was a way to run Mozilla Thunderbird 45.0 or later on Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS (Precise Pangolin) via an official PPA (Personal Package Archive) from the Mozilla Team, but that was only for the Beta versions.
Well, the wait is finally over, and you can now install or upgrade the Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client on any of the official Ubuntu flavors that use it. The latest version available in the main software repositories is 45.2.0. Of course, several security issues have been fixed, so it's better to update as soon as possible.
However, we don't think there's any Ubuntu user out there who won't update to Mozilla Thunderbird 45.2.0 because we've been asked many time when and also why Canonical would make the "big" move of upgrading Mozilla Thunderbird from version 38.7.2 to 45.2.0 or a newer build. Upgrade instructions are available at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.