Mozilla has announced the availability of version 3 of its popular open source Thunderbird email and news client for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The long-awaited major release is based on the Gecko 1.9.1.5 platform, including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, web compatibility, and code simplification and sustainability.

Mozilla Thunderbird 3 brings awesome features like:

Tabs

Thunderbird 3 makes possible to enjoy tabbed browsing experience like Firefox. Tabbed email lets you load emails in separate tabs so you can quickly jump between them.

– New Search with Advanced Filtering Tools

Search results now include advanced filtering tools. You have the option to filter your results by sender, tag, attachments, people, folder, and mailing list. You can also filter your email using the timeline tool.

New Mail Account Setup Wizard

The new Mail Account Setup Wizard matches against a database of email settings from popular mail providers so that you will only need to provide your name, email, and password to set up new mail accounts. This feature is similar to what Outlook has. The new Mail Account Setup Wizard warned me when I tried to add SMPT server which doesn’t use encryption. It is such a cool feature.

One-click Address Book

This feature is similar to Firefox which is simply clicking on the star icon to bookmark the page. You can add people as well by simply clicking on the star icon in the message you received. Two clicks and you can add more details like a photo, birthday, and other contact information.

Attachment Reminder

Now if you type the word attachment (and other words like file types) in the body of your message, the Attachment Reminder will reminds you to add an attachment before hitting send.

Activity Manager

The Activity Manager records all the interactions between Thunderbird and your email provider in one place.

Improved Gmail Integration

Better recognition and integration of Gmail’s special folders such as Sent and Trash including non-English versions of Gmail. Thunderbird also uses All Mail as the Archives folder.

These are the main features that attracted my attention but it still holds more others. Get your copy of Thunderbird 3 from here.