The Unstatement

Thunderbirds are go – or at least Thunderbird 3.0, Mozilla’s overdue and often overlook email partner to the Firefox browser.

The Release Candidate for Thunderbird 3.0 has been posted online “as a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback”, according to Mozilla. Editions are available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux, with this penultimate ‘milestone’ edition is expected to be followed by final code early in the new year.

Thunderbird 3.0 mixes a slew of new features with improvements in speed and Web compatibility. The project’s release notes request feedback on specific areas such as the new search tools, tabbed email windows, revised mail account setup wizard and message archiving.

There’s also enhanced integration with Gmail, including better recognition and integration of Gmail folders such as Sent and Trash, while the Thunderbird 3 mail database is now indexed by Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Mac users get Spotlight seaching, access to the OS X address book and Growl alerts for new messages.

An area which Mozilla will be heavily promoting following the launch of Thunderbird 3.0 will be the development of add-ons such as extensions, themes and plug-ins. This new version of Thunderbird sports a Firefox-like Add-ons Manager to find, download, install and control these third-party components.

— apcmag

I’m getting excited with this long overdue upgrade of Mozilla Thunderbird!