Can Mozilla Thunderbird 3 be an enterprise favorite?

Mozilla Foundation has introduced a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client called Mozilla Thunderbird. In 2004, the company had launched first version 1.0 after modeling Mozilla Firefox. The product was instant hit and received over 5 lakhs downloads in its first three days of release.

Thunderbird 3

The latest version, Thunderbird 3 is already a year late but the company has announced that it is very close to being launched. At present, Thunderbird 3 beta 4 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

It is an update to the Mozilla’s e-mail software and the company has added that the four beta versions to the software have provided enough feedback to give final touches and release the final product. It is reported that the final release of the Thunderbird 3 will be available by November end.

What’s new in ThunderBird 3?

Setup: The most important update in the latest version is the new mail account setup, which offers to make the procedure of developing an account as simple as possible. To configure your account, users have to fill just three options in the setup box, name, e-mail address and also the password, and the setup will do all it can.

Add-ons: The new platform also supports various add-ons to make the various tasks easy and improve the functionality as in the Firefox in becoming the second most popular browser on the planet. Such add-ons expand the utility of today’s emailing system, which are now intertwined with a multitude of web services.

For example, an add-on could integrate with Gmail and Yahoo's Calendar functions. The new Thunderbird 3 will offer advanced calendar functions to compete with Microsoft Outlook.

Search: Search has become a very important routine component of our life while browsing emails daily. In Thunderbird 3, user can search everywhere with just one command as compared to folder based search in its predecessor, Thunderbird 2. The new platform also has many filters for easy access to the desired results.

Archive: The company promised to make the email easier to manage, therefore introduces feature of archive, which allows users to easily move the discard read messages without having to move them to a particular folder.

Interface: The interface of the Thunderbird 3 has also updated and various new features like tabs are included, which would also speed up work flow. It is reported that the platform works fine with Windows 7.

Mozilla Raindrop messaging dashboard

Recently, the company has formulated a new open-source email management project called Raindrop, which will allow users to filter their inbox by sorting their emails.

The new application, Raindrop 0.1 will also connect different email accounts of users and it will also merge messages from contacts on social networking sites. It will also allow users to access YouTube and Flickr links directly in their inbox rather than having to launch separate windows and it will work with the Firefox, Safari and Chrome browsers.

Various analysts predict that the new platform, Raindrop is Mozilla's version similar to Google Wave.