Thunderbird 3 - Nice and Polished!

Many years ago I used MS Outlook to organize my many emails, my calendar and my contacts.  I liked Outlook alright until I finally got sick of how resource intensive it felt after years of use.  I'm talking about the feeling you get when you hear the frantic clicking of your computer accessing stuff on your hard drive and executing processes like a type A personality on cocaine.  So I felt the need for a change!

I discovered Mozilla Thunderbird and I never looked back.  Thunderbird had (and still has) about all I can ask for.  It loads fast, handles all sorts of email accounts (POP, IMAP, Gmail, Hotmail, etc), has a calendar plugin you can use called Lightning, and has BLAZING fast email search functionality!

The email search functionality of Thunderbird is perhaps my favourite feature.  I actively use 3 email accounts and so accumulate A LOT of email from day to day!  This is no matter for thunderbird, as it quietly indexes each and every email as they come in (or after you import your emails from another source).  I most often use the 'Subject or Sender' search when looking for emails.  Want to find an email?    Type in a word or more from the subject, or type in the name of the person whosent it and WHAM, it shows you all the search results lickety split!

So, when I read recently that Mozilla came out with Thunderbird 3, I absolutely had to check it out!

Thunderbird 3 Screenshot

For those of you who have seen Thunderbird before, you'll see that apart from some icon style changes, Thunderbird 3 introduces tabs to its email interface.  I wasn't exactly waiting with baited breath for this feature, but you have to admit that Email clients might as well have tabbed interfaces now that all browsers have them.

New email opened in a tab

Want to see your email in a new window?  Just click on 'other actions' then 'open in new window'.  Another really cool feature you'll spot in the 'other actions' menu is 'show in conversation'.  This threads all emails bearing the same subject line as part of one tree structure, where each reply to an email in that conversation creates its own branch.

'show in conversation' view.  Google GMail meets Mozilla Thunderbird?

I think that the 'conversation' view is a much needed addition to Thunderbird's complement of tools to organize your email.

Finally, I'm happy to report that searching for emails in Thunderbird 3 is just as good as it has ever been.  There is at least one search type that I do not understand ('Recipient filter'.... How is that different from a 'To or CC filter'?) but that's okay because I rarely use anything other the 'Subject or From filter' search anyway.

So, if you're using Windows or Mac, go here, or if you're using Ubuntu, paste the following 4 lines (taken from the Ubuntuzilla project site) into your terminal:

(1) echo "deb http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/project/ubuntuzilla/apt all main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list > /dev/null

(2) sudo apt-get update

(3) sudo apt-get install ubuntuzilla

(4) ubuntuzilla.py -a install -p thunderbird

Most of all, enjoy!