Like Firefox? Try Thunderbird 3

Thunderbird 3 literally borrows the best ideas from Firefox and applies them to e-mail, says Mozilla Messaging CEO in a one-on-one with ComputerWorld Canada. What gives Mozilla's free, open source and cross-platform e-mail application an edge over Outlook

Thunderbird 3, the latest version of Mozilla Messaging's free, open source and cross-platform e-mail application released Tuesday, borrows heavily from Mozilla's Firefox Web browser.

"We have borrowed literally from our friend Firefox and tried to replicate their success in many ways by taking some of their best ideas and seeing if they applied to e-mail," said David Ascher, CEO of Mozilla Messaging, a subsidiary of Mozilla.

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Thunderbird 3 literally borrows the best ideas from Firefox and applies them to e-mail, says Mozilla Messaging CEO in a one-on-one with ComputerWorld Canada. What gives Mozilla's free, open source and cross-platform e-mail application an edge over Outlook

Thunderbird 3, the latest version of Mozilla Messaging's free, open source and cross-platform e-mail application released Tuesday, borrows heavily from Mozilla's Firefox Web browser.

"We have borrowed literally from our friend Firefox and tried to replicate their success in many ways by taking some of their best ideas and seeing if they applied to e-mail," said David Ascher, CEO of Mozilla Messaging, a subsidiary of Mozilla.

There are a lot of notable features, according to Ascher, but the ones that really stand out by users who have been testing it out over the last few months are the tabs and search.

With tabbed e-mail, users can create tabs for messages they refer to often, add additional tabs through add-ons and have their search results appear within the tabs.

"Just like Firefox introduced tab browsing ... we've decided that the idea of tabs for managing content is really useful," said Ascher.

The new search interface stands out because it ranks the search results by relevance and allows users to filter the results. Users can also conduct searches through means such as tags or mailing lists, he noted.

"Over the last 10 years, people have started to use e-mail more and more and they have more and more messages -- that makes the problem of search ever more important," said Ascher.

In developing the interface, Mozilla Messaging looked at the best e-mail search interfaces on the market, which were all fast, all indexed messages and all provided a long list of messages matching a search, according to Ascher.

"We have, I think, a very compelling search interface that allows people to find messages even if they have a large amount of mail," said Ascher.

Search results deemed more relevant, for example, will include those from messages that a user has replied to. "Messages you've replied to are more likely to be important to you than messages you haven't replied to," he explained.

Thunderbird 3 also includes "a bunch of other features just to make people's live easier," said Ascher. A reminder to include your attachments before sending an e-mail is one of his favourites.

"I was very happy when we added a feature that recognizes when you mention keywords like 'attach' or 'attachment' and pops up a little warning on the side that doesn't get in the way, but gently reminds you that maybe you want to attach something. That actually saved me quite a few times," he said.

Tabs and search are notable organizational and productivity features, but the e-mail application's strength also lies in features that Ascher described as either "get out the common pitfalls people have with e-mail or hopefully save people a little bit of embarrassment."

Outlook and Outlook Express are among Thunderbird's top competitors, according to Ascher, but users are coming at it from a variety of other applications.