Thunderbird 3 makes email fly

Almost no one loves email. It's a daily avalanche of news, junk and essential details that can be hard to sort and even tougher to search. Happily, Thunderbird 3 Beta 1 makes taming the thicket of your inbox a little more tolerable with new tabs, a better message viewer and faster message loading. Although it is still in testing, it's now available for download, and this latest version of the free cross-platform email program shows promise.

The new tabbed interface helps keep important messages and mailboxes organized and within easy reach. There's a new layout with improvements in message headers.  For instance, stars indicate if a person is already in your address book or not.

Less visible are important changes under the hood in this beta. A new autosync feature creates local copies of messages stored on your mail server, making mail reading and once frustratingly slow mail searches almost speedy.

And a new add-ons manager paves the way for extending Thunderbird's features as easily as with sister-project, Firefox. But for now, it's somewhat bare.

Windows Vista users will find email and news messages in Windows search results. And for Mac users, Thunderbird 3 now offers built-in access to the OS X address book, the ability to import mail and settings from Mail.app and support for using Growl for new mail alerts.

A lot of work remains according to David Ascher, CEO of the Mozilla Messaging project behind Thunderbird. New features may appear or change. Your email may explode. But, hey, that's part of the fun.

--Michael Fitzhugh, tech writer