[How To] Install Thunderbird 24 beta 3 in Ubuntu 13.04

Mozilla Corporation, who unceremoniously left Thunderbird reeling in deathbed sometime back, now seems to have not really done so. They have been quietly building Thunderbird, improving, fixing bugs behind the scenes. A third beta for version 24 was released a few weeks back and and a stable version release is reported imminent on 17th September. A large number of bug fixes have been reported for this release, out of which important bug fixes & improvements are –
  •     Various improvements to the filter list dialog
  •     Lots of fixes and improvements to the chat
  •     Emails can now be sent to IDN based email addresses (bug 127399)
  •     LDAP passwords are correctly saved again (bug 833971)
  •     Fix a memory leak when closing the compose window
For a more detailed release note visit here.
Now, if you are a faithful user of Thunderbird, you will ofcourse want to install the latest beta. Here is how to download and install Thunderbird 24 Beta 3 –
Note: Before you install, please remember, at the time of writing, there was no officially  working Lightning addon available for this release (unless ofcourse you edit the .xpi file). Also, ExQuilla for Microsoft Exchange is not compatible with v24 b3. 
Note: The steps below will replace your current working Thunderbird 17 with TB 24. Proceed with caution ( not recommended for production systems).
To download Thunderbird 24 b3, head over to the thunderbird download page and download the beta 3 version in the language of your choice.
Backup your existing thunderbird installation in /usr/lib/thunderbird
   sudo mv /usr/lib/thunderbird /usr/lib/thunderbird-bak
Assuming that you downloaded the file in Downloads folder,
   cd /usr/lib
   sudo tar -xvf ~/Downloads/thunderbird-24.0b3.tar.bz2
Now, create the softlinks so that thunderbird starts up normally from the dash
      sudo ln -s plugins  ../thunderbird-addons/plugins/
   sudo ln -s searchplugins ../thunderbird-addons/searchplugins/
   sudo ln -s dictionaries ../../share/hunspell/
   sudo ln -s extensions  ../thunderbird-addons/extensions/
   sudo ln -s hyphenation  ../../share/hyphen/
   sudo ln -s thunderbird ../thunderbird/thunderbird.sh
That’s it! Now you can enjoy Thunderbird v24 b3.
If you want to revert back, remove the new one and restore the old one 
sudo rm /usr/lib/thunderbird
sudo mv /usr/lib/thunderbird-bak /usr/lib/thunderbird

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