Thunderbird 2

Mozilla Corporation today released Thunderbird 2, its free, open source e-mail client for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems in 30 languages. The new release boasts improved security and a variety of new features. Chief among them is message tagging, the ability to label and categorize e-mail for easier searching and organization. In addition to default tags, users can create their own. Thunderbird 2 also features message history navigation, similar in concept to the browser history feature in Firefox. A new find-as-you-type feature winnows displayed messages on the fly, making searches faster. Thunderbird 2 also lets users save searches as folders. Re-executing that search becomes a matter of clicking on the saved search folder. Thunderbird 2 can be easily extended with a variety of free add-ons that are available from Mozilla.org, such as AdBlock Plus and the Lightning calendar.

Thunderbird’s main shortcoming at the moment is its lack of a stable Outlook-compatible calendar, a key to enterprise adoption. Mozilla is working on a calendar that works both without Thunderbird (Sunbird) and with it (Lightning), but it’s not quite ready yet. Nonetheless, Thunderbird is being used by a wide variety of organizations. Though Mozilla Corporation does not track downloads, making it harder to identify corporate users, a spokesperson for the organization pointed to a 2006 article which says some 45,000 French police planned to start using Thunderbird that year. I’m still loyal to Outlook Express - not because I would consider it the best, but simply because the strength of the habit.