Lightning Nightly Updater (Unofficial)

Mozilla Thunderbird users are probably aware of the Lightning addon, which provides access to a calendar and rich options for creating and managing events. This extension is available not only for Thunderbird but also SeaMonkey.

If you're a big fan of the project and cannot wait to test the newest features and improvements, you can integrate Lightning Nightly Updater (LNU) with your email client. It's not officially affiliated with the team behind the original Lightning project, but it's designed to fetch the latest nightly build that gets rolled out on a regular basis (faster than the stable version).

According to the developer, Lightning Nightly Updater gets only the Lightning features which are relevant to your own Thunderbird and operating system version. The bad news is that nightly versions, in general, are typically prone to crashes and sometimes complete breakdown. The good news is that it can be installed alongside the official, stable release, so you can quickly remove it and continue using the stable edition if it's acting up.

Lightning Nightly Updater can be installed on v3.1 and newer versions of Thunderbird. It works by monitoring several FTP directories which contain the latest nightly editions uploaded by the Mozilla team. There are multiple files available, according to the build (branch, trunk) and operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac). Fortunately, the addon autodetects your correct configuration and makes sure to download the matching nightly version.

Some settings can be configured in the options panel of LNU. By default, it detects the full date of the nightly build and shows a confirmation dialog before downloading and installing it. Unless you're comfortable with this, you can browse the FTP folder and decide which build to get. The Google Calendar Provider can be installed too.

LNU removes old backups automatically, keeping only the newest three files, and it creates backups of the storage.sdb file before getting the new builds. These options can be disabled or you can control the number of backup files to preserve. Backups can be performed manually too. Also, you can visit the backups directory in Windows Explorer with one click.

All aspects considered, Lightning Nightly Updater provides quick access to the latest nightly builds for the Mozilla Lightning Project.