Mozilla Gets Ready for New Thunderbird

Mozilla Messaging is about to unveil the third generation of Thunderbird, its free e-mail client, which includes several new features and refinements of existing functions.

In terms of the timing of the release, Dan Mosedale, CTO of Mozilla Messaging, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, said the introduction of Windows 7 actually "represents an opportunity for Mozilla to attract new users, as the new Microsoft operating system doesn't include an Outlook client."

The revamped Thunderbird client allows users to open a piece of e-mail in a new tab, much like the Firefox tabbed browser allows users to keep a given Web window open. This represents an improvement on the current Thunderbird client, which automatically closes one e-mail document when a second is opened.

Another change is a more sophisticated search engine that allows users to search across all folders, refine queries against search results, and see a timeline to help locate messages when there are large numbers of search results. The timeline looks exactly like the timeline in Google News search because the technology used is exactly the same, Mosedale said.

The client has also been retooled for greater speed and for better offline functionality, leaning on improvements on the underlying Gekko Web page rendering engine and graphics infrastructure used in Firefox.

Mozilla is also introducing Raindrop, which, because it's a Web-based messaging platform, has been compared to Google's Wave. But in reality, Mosdale said, it's different and more focused on individual users' needs than Wave. While Wave requires users to all belong to the same Google network (forcing all participants to have a Gmail account, for instance), customers can configure Raindrop around whatever networks they most use, whether that's e-mail, IM, or a social network like Facebook. "It's more based on what users use than forcing them all on a single platform or network," he said.

Raindrop is also infused with intelligence that allows it to differentiate messages by type and content, so that inboxes aren't saturated by a mix of group e-mails, e-mail strings, appointment reminders and the like. While some users get around this by creating rules for incoming messages (like send all e-mail from such-and-such sender to Folder X), Mosedale said, "the onus shouldn't be users to do that."

Originally scheduled to be released on Nov. 10, the Mozilla team is pushing back the release candidate date to Nov. 17.