Mozilla Thunderbird 3 beta 4

Major Features:

1. Get Organized: Thunderbird 2 includes several new features to help you manage your inbox. As you receive email, Thunderbird 2 will help you organize the most important messages to get you through your day.
   • Message Tagging: Thunderbird 2 allows you to “tag” messages with descriptors such as “To Do” or “Done” or even create your own tags that are specific to your needs.
   • Improved Search: Thunderbird 2 features a new find bar that speeds up searches within displayed messages. Thunderbird also offers quick search, which starts showing search results as soon as you start typing in search terms.
   • Saved Searches: Do you find yourself searching for the same subject or message content over and over? Thunderbird 2 saves you time by allowing you to store this search as a folder. Rerunning the search is just a matter of clicking on the saved search folder in the folder pane.
   • Advanced Folder Views: Thunderbird 2 offers a variety of ways for you to organize and display your folders, whether by favorites, recently viewed or folders containing unread messages.
   • Stay Informed: Thunderbird 2 has been updated to provide more informative and relevant message alerts containing sender, subject and message text for newly arrived messages.
   • Easy Access to Popular Web Mail Services: Thunderbird 2 makes it even easier to integrate and use various Web mail accounts from one inbox. Gmail and .Mac users can access their accounts in Thunderbird by simply providing their user names and passwords.
2. Customize Your Email Experience: Thunderbird allows you to customize your email to suit your specific needs whether it’s how you search and find messages or listening to music right out of your inbox.
   • Your Mail, Your Way: Thunderbird users can increase Thunderbird’s functionality and appearance using hundreds of add-ons. A Thunderbird add-on can let you place voice over IP calls, listen to music, manage contacts, and keep track of birth dates all from your inbox. You can even change the appearance of Thunderbird to suit your tastes.
   • Message Templates: Thunderbird 2 allows you to easily set up message templates to save you time – especially if you have to send the same mail message repeatedly.
   • Add-ons Manager for Extensions and Themes: The new Add-ons Manager improves the user interface for managing extensions and themes, making it even easier for you to customize Thunderbird 2.
3. Secure and Protect Your Mail: Thunderbird’s security and privacy measures ensure that your communications and identity remain safe.
   • Cutting Out the Junk: Thunderbird's popular junk mail tools have been updated to stay ahead of spam. Each email you receive passes through Thunderbird's leading-edge junk mail filters. Each time you mark messages as spam, Thunderbird “learns” and improves its filtering so you can spend more time reading the mail that matters. Thunderbird can also use your mail provider's spam filters to keep junk mail out of your inbox.
   • Robust Privacy: Thunderbird 2 offers improved support for user privacy and remote image protection. To ensure a user’s privacy, Thunderbird 2 automatically blocks remote images in email messages.
   • Phishing Protection: Thunderbird protects you from email scams which try to trick users into handing over personal and confidential information by indicating when a message is a potential phishing attempt. As a second line of defense, Thunderbird warns you when you click on a link which appears to be taking you to a different Web site than the one indicated by the URL in the message.
   • Automated Update: Thunderbird’s update system checks to see if you’re running the latest version, and notifies you when a security update is available. These security updates are small (usually 200KB - 700KB), giving you only what you need and making the security update quick to download and install. The automated update system provides updates for Thunderbird on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in over 30 different languages.
   • Open Source: At the heart of Thunderbird is an open source development process driven by thousands of passionate, experienced developers and security experts spread all over the world. The openness and active community of experts helps to ensure the products are more secure and quickly updated, while also enabling us to take advantage of the best third party security scanning and evaluation tools to further bolster overall security.

Enhancements:

• Thunderbird 3 Beta 4 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1.3 platform including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, web compatibility, and code simplification and sustainability.
• There are over 200 changes in this release, many laying the groundwork for future changes. Some notable changes include:
• • New Search with Advanced Filtering Tools
  • • New Search with Advanced Filtering Tools: Search results now include advanced filtering tools. You have the option to filter your results by sender, tag, attachments, people, folder, and mailing list. You can also filter your email using the timeline tool.
    • New Global Search Field with Autocomplete: When typing in the Global Search field, Thunderbird autocompletes against your address book. You have the option of searching everywhere or filtering against different parts of the email such as by subject or by sender.
  • User Experience Improvements
  • • New Mail Account Setup Wizard: The new Mail Account Setup Wizard matches against a database of email settings from popular mail providers so that you will only need to provide your name, email, and password to set up new mail accounts.
    • Redesigned Mail Toolbar: The Mail Toolbar is redesigned to include the new Global Search bar. Buttons such as reply, forward, delete, junk are part of each email message. You can add those buttons back to the main toolbar by customizing the toolbar.
    • Tabbed Email Messages: Double-clicking or hitting enter on a mail message will now open that message in a New Tab window. Middle-clicking on messages or folders will open them in a Tab in the background. When quitting Thunderbird, visible tabs will be saved and will be restored when you open Thunderbird the next time. There is also a new Tab menu on the Tab toolbar to help you switch between Tabs.
    • Smart Folders: The folder pane offers a Smart Folders mode which combines special mailboxes, like Inbox, from multiple accounts. Smart Folders is now on by default.
    • New Message Summary View: Selecting multiple messages will give you a summary view of the emails you have selected.
    • Column Headings: The column headings that are displayed and the order in which they are displayed can now be set on a per-folder basis.
    • Message Archive: You can now file messages from your Inbox or other folders into the new Archive folder system.
    • Activity Manager: The Activity Manager records all the interactions between Thunderbird and your email provider in one place.
    • New Add-ons Manager: The new Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can now be used to find, download, and install Thunderbird Add-ons which includes Extensions, Themes, and Plugins. Note that few Add-ons are compatible with this beta at the time of release, as Add-on developers need to upgrade them.
    • Improved Address Book: If someone is in your address book, it is indicated by a new star icon which you can click to edit contact details inline. If they are not in your address book, you can add them with one click of the icon. A new birthday field allows you to keep track of your friends' birthdays. You can also add a photo for contacts in your address book.
    • Improved Gmail Integration: Better recognition and integration of Gmail's special folders such as Sent and Trash including non-English versions of Gmail. Thunderbird also uses All Mail as the Archives folder.
    • For Windows Vista users, Thunderbird 3 is now integrated with Vista search results. On first start, Thunderbird will prompt to install its indexing system into Windows Vista and you can choose to see Thunderbird email and news messages in Windows search results.
    • For Mac users, Thunderbird 3 can import from Mail.app, read your OS X address book, and use Growl for new mail alerts.
  • Performance Improvements
  • • IMAP Folder Synchronization: Thunderbird will download IMAP messages by default in the background to allow for faster message loading and better offline operation. This feature can be enabled on an individual folder basis via Folder properties, or for all folders in an account via Account Settings / 'Synchronize & Storage'.

Requirements:

• Operating Systems
• • Windows 2000
  • Windows XP
  • Windows Server 2003
  • Windows Vista
• Minimum Hardware
• • Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater)
  • 64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater)
  • 52 MB hard drive space