Come on. Everybody knows that Thunderbird 3, being a space ship (and orange!), had no wings, just three atomic powered motors.

It's got Fanderson written on the back. Thanks.

I've been running the alpha (it's called shredder which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence!) for a few weeks now on a Vista laptop I take with me travelling so I can check my personal mail.

I have to say it's been pretty stable. I don't exactly push it with my use but I expected a lot more flaky than it seems to be.

Or did the sliding door not pull back far enough?

Mine's the one with FAB on the back

Fixed the "Maxes out my CPU until I kill it with task manager whenever I try to view a plaintext email file" bug yet?

Sort that one out, and we'll talk.

Sounds like they're being sensible about release stuff. I'm just waiting for proper integration with Google Calendar and I'm happy :)

"Up to now the Thunderbird client has lived in Firefox's shadow, but Mozilla hopes to change that by energising developers and end users"

Energising? Is El Reg going all Web 2.0 and marketing speak on us?

It's energising, with cattle prod energy.

...is what email is, much more so than browsing the web. That's probably the majority of the reason Thunderbird has been neglected.

Browser: Display all kinds of possibly-hopefully entertaining media.

Email client: Text.

Maybe if it came pre-loaded with emails with pron attachments.

... to a software producer that actually realises its products still need work, instead of foisting off a buggy, insecure product onto the public and then patching it later...!

I hate when they prolong something for very long. Ugh.

I'm a TB fan, sure beats that POS Outlook.

Please, Mozilla, if it's not too late, can we lose the Fisher Price look of Tbird 2 for something a little less, well, designed-by-people-with-no-graphic-design-skills?

It took me a long time to get past the naff icons, function-poor toolbar and chunky layout to find there's actually quite a decent email and Usenet client underneath.

TB isn't going to achieve anything like the market penetration of FF until TB sorts out its immediate first impression problem and stops looking like a blunt-crayon ripoff of Outlook Express.

Yes, it's superficial to judge a programme by its default LAF, but I do it, you do it, and everyone who has ever used a GUI does it.

And yes I know there'll probably be an extension somewhere to make it look like Opera / World of Warcraft / Andy Warhol's baked beans cans, but I've got 10,000,000,001 better things to do with my life ...

Paris, because she knows that looks are important ...