Mozilla Releases Thunderbird 3 Alpha

May 14th, 2008 at 3:00 PM - News by John Martellaro

The Mozilla group has released an alpha of its Thunderbird e-mail program for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. New in this version for Mac is the long-awaited integration with the Mac OS X Address Book. The early release is for testing only.

"This release does not represent the final product. Some of the features listed below are highly experimental and will likely change before the final release. They may come with crashes and bugs and may potentially cause data loss in profiles (configuration data, preferences, downloaded mail)," Mozilla Messaging said.

In addition to the Mac OS X Address Book integration, version 3 will have an Add-on manager, a crash reporter and the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine. TB 3 is now a native Cocoa application.

Those who want to contribute to the Mozilla project or just see a preview can download the early build from the Mozilla Messaging site. The build requires OS X Tiger or later.

The Eudora 8 e-mail program is built on top of the Thunderbird engine, and while the latest Eudora build does not seem to be based on the Thunderbird 3 Alpha, those who want to check out the current state of Eudora 8 can download 8.0.0b3 from the Mozilla wiki.