New search and tabs take flight in Thunderbird 3 Video

New search and tabs take flight in Thunderbird 3 Video Transcript

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>> Seth Rosenblatt: Thunderbird 3 has just been pushed out of the nest and whether you're looking for a customizable desktop email client, a robust tool to manage or archive email offline, or a free alternative to Outlook Thunderbird makes for a must use emailed. I'm Seth Rosenblatt for Download.com and today we're taking a first look at Thunderbird 3. Open source and extensible like its better known sibling Firefox Thunderbird brings a powerful set of features to desktop email management. Setting up an account is easy and the new account wizard is geared to help you with webmail, a smart design given that most people are using it. It also allows for multiple account support and you can keep your accounts separate or blend them together. The new version supports tabbed email viewing and a massively overhauled search feature. Search is one of the big successes of GMAIL and Mozilla here has designed a search tool that is the star of the new version. On Windows 7 and Vista and on Macs that have Spotlight it integrates results with a desktop search. You can change the default search all messages to focus on a particular part of the email, filtering down to relevant fields. You can also save any search besides the default as a virtual folder. Typing a quarry will offer you predictive results. The default search will open your results in a new tab in an easy to read layout that also includes a timeline bar graph. One drawback to the search is that it will take ages the first time it indexes your messages if you've got a lot of them. After the first indexing each new email is added as it comes in. Email's open by default into new tabs making the email reading experience far more similar to the web browsing one. You can toggle this in options. The control plus tab hotkey combo will cycle through your tabs and there's an open tab button on the right side of the tab bar to help you manage them. The new activity manager records all your interactions between your email server on Thunderbird making it easier to track down errors when you send or receive email. There's also an entirely new system for archiving messages based on GMAIL's archive and forget it method. Just hit A on your keyboard. Add ons aren't new to Thunderbird but they're a key feature. They can be used to add calendars, dictionaries, music players and even customize the look of the client. [ Background music] >. While some users have complained about the new Thunderbirds memory usage personally I haven't experienced any problems. With a first look at Thunderbird 3 I'm Seth Rosenblatt for CNET. ^M00:02:25 [ Music ]