Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate: Just in Time for Thanksgiving

by Joe Brockmeier - Nov. 25, 2009Comments (8)

If you just can't get away from email over the holidays, you can at least help test the release candidate for Thunderbird 3.0. The Mozilla folks released Thunderbird 3.0 RC 1 on Tuesday with more than 100 changes in the release. It's been a long time in coming, the first release in the 2.0 series was back in 2007. But Thunderbird 3.0 looks like it might be worth the wait when the final is released.

What's new and interesting? The user interface changes are probably the first thing you'll notice, especially the new tabbed interface. Instead of opening messages in a new window, they'll now open in a tab. Tabs are saved between sessions by default, so you can pick up right where you left off. The toolbar has been redesigned as well, and the most commonly used buttons are right on each mail message in 3.0.

3.0 will also include "smart folders," for better managing special mailboxes. 3.0 also includes better search tools and filtering, so you can easily manage your mail nearly any way you like.

Thunderbird 3.0 also makes it much easier to set up your email against popular email providers. For instance, if you have a Gmail account, all you need to do is to enter your name, email address, and password. It's a major improvement over needing to know ports and whether a provider uses encrypted or unencrypted communication. Another welcome change in 3.0 is improvements to IMAP performance.

The release candidate is available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Be sure to read the release notes before installing Thunderbird 3.0, especially if you're using one of the Thunderbird 2.0 releases now.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others.


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8 Comments
 

Looks like there are some substantial changes in this version, which I think would annoy people. Ah well, I guess I'm just old school... I never saw a reason to change from mutt.


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Any support for exchange yet? I don't want to use it but work gives me no choice :(


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How about some screenshots? Duh.


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In order to connect to exchange from Thunderbird - Check out Davmail: http://davmail.sourceforge.net/


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I have been using the 3.x pre-releases and the betas, as well as the 3.1 alpha 1 nightly builds, for a long time now. the interface is a lot cleaner, but one of the best features is rarely ever mentioned - it's stability.


I use it to check 3 GMail accounts and 2 GMX accounts (all IMAP), plus 4 HoTMaiL accounts and one HoTPOP account (all via POP3) and a Yahoo account (using the Webmail extension and the Yahoo for Webmail extension). This is done on a daily basis - and it works.


Flawlessly.


If you want to setup known mail accounts (GMail, Yahoo, HoTMaiL, etc) it simply asks you a few questions and sets every thing up for you. Once it is set up, you're golden.


The total size of the folders for all mail accounts exceeds 6 GB of data on my HD, but it never blinks at that at all - it performs synchronizations in the background as specified by my settings as needed, and it even manages to check for its own updates as needed too, unobtrusively downloading those and then notifying you that it is time to restart to apply the update.


Once this goes gold, I cannot see why everyone will not jump on it - it imports settings and information from 2.x setups with ease, and the learning curve is not all that high for this new version.


All in all, I am positive 3.0 is going to be a hit.


As for Tb and Exchange: I use Tb on my laptop to connect to my school's exchange server via POP to check my school email - it was just a matter of asking the Net Admin the server names to set up. However, if you need more than basic POP / SMTP setup, then that DavMail looks like a good winner.


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I use to work with Firefox on windows xp where i never tried with Thunderbird but my new collage computer lab is equipped with linux and Thunderbird actually working on linux ubuntu is not that bad experience but even not that easy for windows addicted person well for Thunderbird i found this 3.0 new version simple and easy extensions similar to Firefox where interface is much improved there is five reason to try Thunderbird check here for details http://www.techarena.in/guide/19023-five-reasons-move-thunderbird-3.htm


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The most incredible oversight I have ever seen in email programs is the lack of a "Backup my mail" and "Restore my mail" function. Imagine a word-processor without a "Save" button...!


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