Mozilla Launches Thunderbird 2.0 Alpha 1

E-mail centralization applications form a territory where the face-off between Microsoft and Mozilla has translated to a race among desktop e-mail clients. Hot on the tracks of the Redmond Company who has recently released Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta, Mozilla has also unveiled the next step of the Thunderbird solutions. Thunderbird 2.0 Alpha 1, designed to integrate seamlessly with Windows, Linx and Mac OS X, aims to be a developer preview but is also accessible to the wide audience with the specification from the company that the product is in actuality in alpha phase and meant for testing purposes only and not for wide use. "Current users of Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5.0.x should not use Thunderbird 2 Alpha 1," warns the company on its web page.

"Our goal is to continue to build a "best of breed" email product for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X by focusing on: privacy, spam, security, and tools for organizing and managing your e-mail. We have ambitious goals for the workload between now and our next major release," states Mozilla on its Web page describing its strategy.

As its predecessor, Thunderbird 2.0 Alpha 1 is built using the standards-compliant rendering engine Gecko, and will be offered as a free cross-platform desktop mail client. Mozilla has scheduled the release of a beta version of the e-mail client in the upcoming period and has announced that the final product will ship by the end of fall 2006.