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Thunderbird 3 Beta 2

Version: 3.0 beta 2

Downloads Count: 3,503

License Type: Free

Price: Free

Date Added: Feb 28, 2009

Operating Systems: Windows XP, Windows 98, Macintosh, Linux, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008

Requirements: Pentium 233 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 52 MB hard drive space

File Size: 8061 KB

Author: Mozilla

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Editorial Review of Thunderbird 3 Beta 2

Thunderbird 3 Beta 2, a preview release of the upcoming version 3 of the free mail program, will look entirely familiar to anyone using Mozilla's excellent Thunderbird 2. It showcases a few new features, such as archiving and a new activity manager, but most of the changes are under the hood.

The new Archive feature (inspired by Gmail) automatically moves a message to an archive folder when you hit "A" with a message open or select Message | Archive. The archives folder layout sorts messages by year, with subfolders for each month.

The other new addition, the Activity Manager, show all interactions between Thunderbird and your e-mail account server(s)--such as sending and receiving mail--in a new pop-up window. Thunderbird 2 doesn't do a good job at telling you what it's doing, and the Activity Manager should make things more clear.

These new additions are nice, but probably won't change much for your day-to-day emailing. And aside from some handy new buttons for functions such as Reply, Forward, and Archive, which show up in the header information bar next to the from: and to: info when you preview or open a message, you probably won't immediately notice most of the other changes. But there are a slew of bug fixes and tweaks in the new version, such as faster message loading for IMAP accounts. See the release notes for the full list of changes in this beta.

Current Thunderbird users may want wait for a more final version of the new bird before making the upgrade. Mozilla emphasizes that this beta isn't for everyday use, "but for developers and testers to give us early feedback." Despite the bug fixes, you'll almost certainly find new glitches and other issues. For example, Javascript is disabled for security reasons. And while you should be able to safely install the new version alongside version 2 on Windows and Macs (but not Linux), extensions from version 2 will likely not work.

Note: This download link will take you to the Thunderbird early releases download page, where you can choose a version for Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux in a variety of languages.

--Erik Larkin

Description of Thunderbird 3 Beta 2

Thunderbird 3 Beta 2 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality of the new features and platform changes that will be included in Thunderbird 3.

The archive feature is straightforwardly borrowed from GMail's archive feature, which we think is great. The idea is that figuring out exactly which folder each message should be filed is a process that can take a lot of time and effort--something that wasn't a real problem in the early days of email, but which becomes a real time sink with thousands of messages. With a good enough search engine, it's easier for many users to simply “archive” the message (doesn’t really matter where), get it out of the way, and then rely on the search capability to find the message again.

In this beta, we're half-way there. The archive feature is there if you want it, but you can also use the standard “file in a folder” method. Thanks to work we did before beta2, the archiving is fast, putting messages in per-month folders at the click of a buttton or a keystroke. The new fast global search hasn’t landed yet, but even our “old” cross-folder search mechanism has gotten a lot better.

The second feature worth highlighting is also not fully deployed, but already useful. The Activity Manager was born out of a recognition that Thunderbird 2 is pretty bad at telling you what it's doing. It says a lot of things, it says them fairly loudly, but they’re rarely the things you want to know. We're building infrastructure that will let the various bits of Thunderbird be much more helpful in describing what’s going on (through a log of notable events), what went wrong (non-intrusive but notable alerts), and how it’s progressing at long-running tasks (with more context than just a single progress bar). Teaching software that wasn’t designed with a notification mechanism or philosophy in mind how to be polite and informative is a slow and arduous task, but we’re making good progress. In Thunderbird 3b2, there’s an Activity Manager window, which for now will just report on message moves, copies and deletes, and IMAP auto-syncing. Now that the framework is in place, we should be able to have a lot more informative messages when you need them, and reduce the number of dialog boxes (especially the ones you can’t do anything about!).

Note: This link takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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Most recent User Reviews for Thunderbird 3 Beta 2

Reviewed by: emmat81

06-28-2009

Duration of ownership: 18 Months

Strengths: Free client.

Weaknesses: No search capabilities, no conversation view, not cohesive experience.

Overall Evaluation: Thunderbird worked ok as my basic email client. I recently switched over to Postbox, which has been out for about a year from the original developers of TB. Postbox has search and conversation view, and overall usability is just a lot better. Highly recommended: www.postbox-inc.com
Reviewed by: Northlite

03-17-2009

Duration of ownership: 1 Months

Strengths: Handles IMAP better then Windows Mail etc ever has. Have been using Thunderbird for years now and am generally happy with it over Outlook Express, Outlook, Windows Mail (live).

Weaknesses: Sometimes fails to put sent items in IMAP online folder and has to be canceled, not big deal for me though.

Overall Evaluation: Unless they make it so I can customize the 1 1/2" header pane in version 3 I probably won't be upgrading, on my 19" wide screen its' fine but on my laptop it leaves me with empty space wasted. I work with a remote person sending me graphics for a web page, Thunderbird handles this the best for me to save and use.
Reviewed by: neospyce

05-16-2007

Duration of ownership: 3 Months

Strengths: Simple and great for those who don't need clients as heavy as Outlook.

Weaknesses: Not aware of any.

Overall Evaluation: This is a great client, especially if you are a Vista convert and are completely revolted my Windows Mail. Do you miss Outlook Express? If so, then this is definitely what you want, but just remember that you will have to find your way around to configure it and that is quite simple.

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Thunderbird 3 Beta 2

Editorial Review of Thunderbird 3 Beta 2

Description of Thunderbird 3 Beta 2

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Most recent User Reviews for Thunderbird 3 Beta 2

Reviewed by: emmat81

Reviewed by: Northlite

Reviewed by: neospyce

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Thunderbird 3 Beta 2

Editorial Review of Thunderbird 3 Beta 2

Description of Thunderbird 3 Beta 2

Add Your Review

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Most recent User Reviews for Thunderbird 3 Beta 2

Reviewed by: emmat81

Reviewed by: Northlite

Reviewed by: neospyce

See more user reviews »

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