14 DAY TRIAL // The Thunderbird development team has recently announced the availability of the Thunderbird 3 Beta 1. At the moment, the release is available for download as a preview of the next major version of the widely known mail client. Thunderbird 3 is promoted as being built upon the Gecko 1.9.1 platform and promises to bring around 750 changes, most of them preparing other future updates.
The first noticeable new features the mail client comes with are a tab interface for Mail and an improved message reader view. The tabbed email feature means that users can open all mails, folders or calendars in different tabs, if the Lightning extension is installed. The improved reader view is only the first stage from an entire series of refinements the team plans to bring to the reading experience. At this stage, the release notes state, the email controls will be brought closer to the users' operating area.
Other user experience enhancements include a new Add-ons Manager, which is able to find, download, and install Thunderbird Add-ons such as Extensions, Themes, and Plugins, as well as an improved address book, which allows users to add or edit contacts through simple commands. In addition, Vista users will benefit from the integration of the Thunderbird 3 Beta 1 in Windows' search results, through an indexing system that users are prompted to install. Mac users can set Thunderbird to import from Mail.app, read their OS X address book, and use Growl for new mail alerts.
Besides an improved import of mail from other Mail clients, Thunderbird will also feature improvements to IMAP for faster message viewing. IMAP messages will be downloaded in the background, this way allowing for faster loading and enabling better offline operation. Users can enable the feature either for a single folder through the folder's properties, or for all folders at the same time, via Account Settings / Sync & Disk Space.
The development team warns about the fact that this is only a beta version of the product, which implies that it comes with bugs and crashes that could lead to data losses in profiles (such as configuration data, preferences, and downloaded mail). The release has been made available mainly for testing purposes, and the team encourages users to provide feedback on the application. Tests on the mail client can be conducted on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux using 38 different languages.
More information on the subject can be found on Mozilla Messaging, where the release notes can also be viewed. Thunderbird 3 Beta 1 is available for download on Softpedia as well, via this link.