The first release candidate of Thunderbird 3 has just been released by the Mozilla developers after four beta releases. This marks a new milestone in the development of the desktop email client. The changes in this release are unfortunately not made clear in the release notes as they are being used to list the new features that have been implemented into Thunderbird 3 so far. These new features include a new search engine with advanced filtering tools. Especially the global search option should come in very handy for users who have configured Thunderbird to access multiple email accounts.
Other new features include a tabbed interface to open multiple messages and mailboxes at once (Double-clicking or hitting enter on a mail message will now open that message in a New Tab window. Middle-clicking on messages or folders will open them in a Tab in the background), a smart folder mode which combines mailboxes from several email accounts into one mailbox (think of one inbox that contains mails from multiple accounts), improved add-ons manager, address book and Gmail integration among other new features.
Thunderbird 3 Release Candidate 1 is available for download in all supported languages and for all operating systems at Mozilla Messaging. Users should check out the known issues in the release notes before they upgrade their version of the email client. The developers do mention that this release is not intended to be used in a productive environment. Make sure to backup all settings before performing the upgrade. (via Mozilla Messaging)
Related posts:
- Thunderbird 2 Release Candidate 1 Download
- Email Client Thunderbird 3.1 Alpha Released
- Thunderbird 3 Beta 4 Released
- Mozilla Thunderbird 3 Released
- Thunderbird 3 Beta 3
- How To Setup Multiple Email Identities In Thunderbird
- 7 Add-ons To Get You Started With Thunderbird 3
- Thunderbird Extension Contacts Sidebar

Not until Lightning is ready !!!
Thunderbird 3 RC1 was released on Thursday 19th November, an excellent email client is is too.
Please ignore my stupid post about RC1 having been released Thursday 19th November, I’m using a nightly build. sorry for any confusion.
With the RC1 of thunderbird 3, I got/sent gmail slowly.
Don’t know why
We’ve have the release candidate ready to go, but it’s not going out to the SourceForge mirrors due to some major issues with SourceForge. Our releases have been stuck since Wednesday afternoon. Most of SourceForge itself was down a good chunk of yesterday.
Been waiting for this big improvement but I dont know if its me being stupid but in version 3 there doesn’t seem to be an option to set up a POP account. Can anyone help?
It does IMAP over POP in the automatic setup, so if your server does both, it’ll pick IMAP (which pretty much everybody should be using nowadays). You can manually setup a POP account.