One of the big reasons why Firefox has become so popular is because they have revolutionized the way we interact with our browsers with the integration of tabbed browsing.  Mozilla first started using tabbed browsing in 2001 and Thunderbird users have wanted this basic feature for years.  Tabs are finally a standard feature in Thunderbird.  Open one window and have your inbox and as many emails as you want opened at the same time, all in the same window, brilliant!  This has been the best new feature added to this latest release of Thunderbird.  However, there is one feature with the tabbed browsing that I would still like added.  When I want to compose a new message, I would like the window that opens up to become a tab.

Another cool feature added to Thunderbird is how they overhauled the ability to search your inboxes.  If you’re like me, you have more than one email address to manage; I have four that I use.  I can search a specific inbox or all of them.  There is also a cool statistics feature at the top of all your search results that is a bar graph of the emails you’ve received matching a search term through time.  You can click a certain week to get more detailed information about your search results and even down to the day.  This can be useful when monitoring your messaging patterns.  The new search also gives you the ability to narrow your search results by selecting a specific person, a mailing list, emails with attachments along with several other options to help you find that email from last year more efficiently.  The one thing I would like to change about the new  search is the way the information is displayed.  The search results all run together.  I wish each result was in its own little bubble with a background to make it stand out from the other results.  Despite this minor lack of detail, I am very pleased with the new search feature; it looks like Mozilla took a page from Google’s book.

Thunderbird was also nice enough to include some neat little bonus features.  For instance when you’re writing an email you may say something like; “Please read the attachment closely.”  Once you’re done typing the word ‘attachment,’ Thunderbird will politely remind you to include that attachment so you don’t look like an idiot if you forget to attach it.  I really like this feature because I have forgotten to include an attachment before.  That’s not the only keyword it works with, but definitely the most useful.

Thunderbird also created a nice handy integrated inbox as I’ve grown to call it.  Thunderbird now gives you a master inbox with the ability to micromanage all of your separate email accounts.  This makes my inbox more organized and it is easier to see all the information from all of my email accounts simultaneously.

One feature I would still like to see added (although I’m sure possible through plug-ins) is to have the address book become integrated with social networking sites like Facebook and Linkedin.  This would just make getting in touch with your contacts a little bit easier.

All in all, I give Thunderbird 3.0 a big thumb up.  It included some more basic features like the tabs and powerful search along with some wow features like the word recognition and search statistics.  Mozilla executed this upgrade well too; I haven’t noticed any bugs or crashes.  Thunderbird is known for the quality and security of Mozilla products along with the intuitive, clutter free interface that’s synonymous to all Mozilla products.  If you are a Thunderbird 2.0 user, I highly recommend the upgrade and if you’re still using Microsoft’s archaic and confusing Outlook, please switch to Thunderbird and give it a week; I’ll guarantee you will not want to switch back.