By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

Holy mackeroli! The Mozilla Foundation has released version 3 of its popular email application Thunderbird and it is smoking.

When companies roll out new products at full version intervals this is how they are supposed to be. There are a ton of new features, the same old features and an improved UI that thunders “email 3.0″.

As a Thunderbird user for over 5 years I can tell you that this is the best version yet. A welcome refresh to the most powerful free email client available.

Mozilla should relabel the button for Thunderbird downloads to “Downloud Thunderbird”. I’ve been running Thunderbird 3 for about an hour now and it is impressive. It is working its way through my 100k+ emails and working some heuristic voodoo in preparation for a better search solution.

New features like Smart Folders, new toolbars, activity manager, alerts that open individual messages, better add-ons manager and a little savior called ‘the attachments reminder’. Other apps might have had the attachment reminder for a while but consider this like Twitter lists . . . they were neglected for long time and other companies made them but when they came to Twitter they made a huge difference.

Did I mention tabbed email browsing above? I didn’t? What was I thinking! The Thunderbird team has brough a web browsing favorite to the interface in the form of tabbed email viewing. No more searching for an open email window that might have gone out of focus as you went to copy and paste into an email or simply opened another application.

The most powerful feature in version 3 that I have found so far is the “Show in conversation” filter that creates a new tab for an email exchange. The tab opens with a message board thread style hierarchy and a preview pane below it – brilliant. The tab stays put, no out of focus and can be opened from any email. This will be a huge time saver when reading emails from search on a given topic as they can now all be instantly aggregated and easily navigated. The super sick feature of this threaded tab . . . the ability to print or export to PDF the entire thread.

Thunderbird 3 is everything that was lacking in the previous version and more. As a Firefox and Thunderbird user I couldn’t be happier with the cross pollination of features. The only thing that I was have liked to see in this version is the add-on Lightning to have been integrated for calendar management. At this time it is incompatible with version 3 which is kind of a drag.

I have never been this excited about email, ever. If you’re interested head over to Mozilla and get yourself a copy.

Update: The new search feature is great. No email application has a search like this. It is highly intuitive and 1000% faster than the previous search.

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