So after a long wait, Mozilla have finally released version 3 of it’s email client, Thunderbird. I use thunderbird for all my business emails and have never had a problem with it. It’s very simple to use and very quick. So what improvements have been made to an almost flawless program? Well Mozilla claim it is now even faster. Personally I have not really noticed much difference here but even if it loads a second faster that is still an improvement so I wont grumble. The first change the user will notice however are the tabs. Thunderbird now has Firefox style tabs however I don’t see much need for these, especially as when you write a new email it still brings it up in a new window.

One massive improvement is the simple creation of email accounts. For a regular computer user such as myself it has never been difficult setting up new emails but for more novice users it has been more challenging as they are not expected to know what their STMP settings are. Well now Thunderbird will look them up for you. All you need to know now is your email address and password and Thunderbird does the rest. It also asks for your password on initial setup of the account which is something i’ve always thought it lacked.

Another new feature is the improved search. Again, it is not something that I use much and when I do I usually do a basic search of subject titles or message content of recent emails. But if you’re looking for a certain email from a certain someone that contains a certain phrase then you can easily find the exact email you are looking for. Thunderbird lists the senders of the emails down the left hand pane and also displays a graph showing the months the emails were sent in. All this information of course, is stored in it’s own tab.

A more detailed list of the new features can be found here.

I think Thunderbird has taken a step backwards graphically. All the graphics and even the logo itself look more outdated than in the previous version. To me they give the whole program a feel of Windows 2000 and considering the program itself doesn’t use very many graphics anyway, I would have expected more effort to have been put into the few it does contain, or at least keeping the same would have been enough. Of course this doesn’t alter the performance of the program in any way and for me Thunderbird still remains the number 1 free email client in the world.