Mozilla ready to hatch Thunderbird 3

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 26 Nov 2009 at 10:07

Mozilla Messaging has unveiled the release candidate of Thunderbird 3, the latest iteration of its popular email client.

The realease candidate brings a number of significant new features to the software, including advanced filtering tools allowing users to search their emails by sender, tag, attachments, people, folder, and mailing list.

Thunderbird 3 further benefits from a streamlined interface that cleans up the toolbar by moving many of its functions to email messages, which will benefit from the tabbed interface.

The email client is hoping to replicate Firefox's success by pushing Thunderbird's add-ons feature front and centre. At the heart of this is a new add-ons manager which can be used to find, download, and install extensions, themes, and plugins

Rather than having super long releases, we'd like to release significantly more frequently than we have historically done

The client is also touting tighter integration with Vista, Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. Installing the software's indexing system will allow users to search their email through the OSes built in search facility.

Thunderbird 3 has been two years in the making, and will arrive over a year later than the organisation first planned. This is a situation the company hopes not to repeat as it moves into development of Thunderbird 4.

"Part of the plan for Thunderbird is to move our development process in a more agile direction," Mozilla Messaging says in the Thunderbird release notes. "Rather than having super long releases, we'd like to release significantly more frequently than we have historically done."

To that end, the company plans to begin releasing updates in line with major Firefox updates. "Shoot for one major release every four to six months, based on the closest appropriate Firefox/Roadmap release," the release notes read.