Nonetheless, I was forced to find an alternative solution.  I turned to Mozilla’s offering, Thunderbird, after having been please so long with Firefox.  However, I was less than thrilled with Thurderbird 2.  Because I don’t plan on talking about Thunderbird 2, I’ll just say that it left me wanting.  And that’s when I found out about Thunderbird 3.

I’ve been using Thunderbird 3 from the earl alpha builds until today (as beta 4 pre, or a nightly beta 3).  Essentially, it’s nearing the end of it’s beta phase, and in perhaps a few short months, it will be ready for public consumption.  Compared to TB (Thunderbird) 2, it feels like a complete redo, and it may very well be.  While it still is not a beautiful to look at as Mail.app, it is certainly within the realm of a good looking app.  But more than that, it just works.  There are points that I wish would be better, namely the way accounts are managed.  But overlooking that, Thunderbird 3 is simply amazing.  I recently discovered that it integrates within Spotlight on OS X, and something Mail.app has had that I did not realize TB 3 has, global searching of messages.  This alone may seem like it should be automatic, but currently it’s an option you have to enable, but once everything is indexed, finding emails across all account is stupid easy.

I recently was an attendee at OSCON and was lucky enough to meet David Ascher, CEO of Mozilla Messaging.  From David’s presentation, I learned quite a bit about TB 3, especially how things on screen are rendered.  To my surprise, I learned it was essentially HTML and a bunch of javascript.  It actually has an internal copy of jQuery, which makes javascript development easy, yet powerful.  I was so impressed by all of this, I have decided to start developing / bug fixing TB 3.  I look forward to helping make TB 3 a better product, so that perhaps others will find it as useful as I have.

Sure, there is a small part of me that hopes Apple gets it right with Mail.app in OS X 10.6, but even if they do, I very likely will stick with Thunderbird … if only due to the simple fact that is is a powerful, easy to use mail client (and is available on Windows too!) that does what it’s supposed to.