Mozilla’s Thunderbird 3 E-mail Client Released

The latest major version of Mozilla’s popular e-mail client, Thunderbird, was expected late last month, but that time came and went, and no cigar. Whether or not the rumors were wrong, or various reasons held it back, I’m not sure, but it’s here now, and just went live about an hour before this post. It’s available for the three major operating systems as you’d expect, and in many, many different languages.

I admit that I’ve been excited for this new release, because Thunderbird has been my preferred e-mail client for quite a while, and unlike 1.x > 2.0, which didn’t seem to be a true major upgrade, 3.0 brings a lot of new and improved features to the table. One of the more focused features is tabbed e-mails (this is certainly becoming a theme, huh?), which is just as it sounds. Rather than open up an e-mail in a separate window, you can instead open it in a new tab, and easily switch between open e-mails. This is one feature I particularly appreciate, because it always bugged me that I couldn’t open (as in, in a pop-up window) more than one e-mail at a time.

Like Firefox, Thunderbird offers a rich extensions database, and the internal tool to add them has been improved. Rather than go to a website in order to search for new extensions, you can do it all through the “Add-ons” section, which again, is another great feature. The same add-ons section is where you control plugins and themes as well, but that’s no different than before.

As I mentioned in a quick look at the beta 4 release last month, one of the best new features is the improved setup. If you’re using a service that has rather simple configuration (no exotic port numbers, or differing servers), you should be able to access your e-mail without issue. In the best case, you put in your name, e-mail address and then the password, and Thunderbird will work hard to take care of the rest.

There’s a lot more than just these three features added to the latest version, and to check them out, I recommend heading to the URL below. If you’re ready to take the latest version for a spin, you can go straight to the official homepage.

If you like Firefox’s tabbed browsing, you’re going to love tabbed email. Tabbed email lets you load emails in separate tabs so you can quickly jump between them. Perhaps you’re responding to an email and need to refer back to an earlier email. Tabbed email lets you keep multiple emails open for easy reference. Double-clicking or hitting enter on a mail message will now open that message in a new tab window. Right-clicking on messages or folders will open them in a tab in the background.