Mozilla lets Thunderbird 3 fly

From CNET News.com: Mozilla Messaging pushed the stable release of Thunderbird 3 out of the nest on Tuesday, and there's a lot to like in case you haven't been following the beta development of this Outlook alternative. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, the long-overdue Thunderbird 3 introduces several hefty new features and some long-needed improvements, including an overhauled search and message indexing, tab support, and a revamped setup wizard that's designed to make new account setup quick and painless.

One feature that isn't included is the calendaring add-on, Lightning. Originally, Mozilla had planned to bake the extension into the program, but decided back in February 2009 to change course and leave it up to users to download. Although Thunderbird natively comes with Microsoft Exchange support, there's no calendar and therefore no meeting support in the default Thunderbird installation. Along with Lightning, there's an essential Google Calendar add-on for Lightning that gives Google users calendar support in Lightning.

Even without Lightning, Thunderbird makes for an excellent desktop-based e-mail client. Beyond Outlook replacement, it also makes a savvy offline or local-storage tool for the various Web mail providers. Gmail integration has existed in Thunderbird for a while, but improvements in version 3 include better recognition and integration of Gmail's special folders. These include Sent and Trash, and the non-English versions of Gmail. The All Mail option in Gmail defaults in Thunderbird to the Archives folder.

Undeniably, the killer feature in Thunderbird 3 is the search. The most obvious competitor, Microsoft Outlook, doesn't offer anything that comes close to the level of granular control that Mozilla has given Thunderbird users. The new search bar is dominant at the top of the interface, and you can change the default Search All Messages to focus on a particular part of the e-mail, filtering down to the Subject, From, Recipient, To, CC, or message body fields, or to a combination thereof.

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