After yesterday's Chrome Beta surprise from Google, the time has come to enjoy (finally) a better and smarter e-mail client from Mozilla. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, your favorite Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail, RSS and newsgroup client was updated earlier today to the highly anticipated 3.0 release. What's new? Well, in short... Thunderbird 3.0 introduces tabbed e-mail experience, e-mail archiving (including GMail), a redesigned preferences and add-ons management dialogs (just like the ones from Firefox), global search and, last but not least, performance improvements. Based on the Gecko 1.9.1.5 platform, Thunderbird 3.0 for Linux is faster, more stable and eats fewer RAM. If you want to know more, we've listed below the most important features of the freshly cooked Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0, with some explanations!

Highlights of Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0:

· Advanced filtering for search results (by tag, people, attachments, mailing list or folder);
· Global search field (with autocomplete function);
· New e-mail account setup wizard (with automatic detection of the mail server and its capabilities);
· Revamped mail toolbar (includes Global Search);
· Tabs for e-mails (messages are opened in tabs now);
· Smart folders (Unique Inbox and Trash folders for multiple e-mail accounts);
· Summary view of grouped items (when selecting multiple items from a folder, Thunderbird display a few lines for each one);
· Column headings;
· E-mail archiving system;
· Activity manager (records the intercommunication between Thunderbird and your mail provider);
· Brand-new Add-ons manager (like the one in Firefox);
· Brand-new Preferences dialog (like the one in Firefox);
· Better address book (with contact photo and birthdays reminder);
· Better GMail integration (with better support for non-English versions);
· IMAP e-mail synchronizer (messages are downloaded by default in background for offline use and faster access).

Unfortunately, there are no packages for major Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu or Fedora, but they are expected very soon from third-party developers or through the update system. Mozilla doesn't provide distro-specific packages and it never did. Maybe in the near feature Mozilla will add DEB and RPM packages to its products, just like Opera, Google and Adobe provide for their applications. But right now, the only way for you to test the brand-new release of Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 is to download the binary archive (see below for download link) and execute the "thunderbird" executable from the folder, after extracting it.

See how the new Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 looks like in the screenshots below, tested by the Softpedia Linux team on an Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) 32-bit machine.



Download Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 the binary and source packages right now from Softpedia.