Thunderbird 3.1 is out

THE MOZILLA FOUNDATION'S open source email client Thunderbird has been updated to version 3.1.

Mozzarella claims that Thunderchicken is impressively fast and has new ways to search your e-mail. It includes a migration assistant and a download manager in this latest update as well as some bug fixes.

The biggest change to Thunderbird is the Quick Filter bar that speeds up the email search process by making a number of filters readily available.

You type a query into the search field and filters to confine the search to Sender, Recipients, Subject, and Body appear below the filter.

You can also filter different types of emails, including Unread, Starred, Contact, Tags, and Attachment.

There is a new migration assistant if you're using another email client and want to make the jump to Thunderbird.

The assistant now will let you also roll back interface changes from Thunderbird 2 and it will link you to add-ons such as Compact Header that restore some functionality that was lost in last December's upgrade to Thunderbird 3.

Thunderbird 3.1 comes with the Firefox download manager and it shares the same engine as Firefox, Gecko 1.9.2.

Mozzarella says that Thunderbird 3.1 is faster because of the bug fixes. µ