Mozilla's next Thunderbird gives Gmailers hope

hunderbird 3.0 was a less than stellar piece of software. Mozilla's email client was marred by some pretty serious bugs, such as the failure to import mail from past editions, which meant the suite had a habit of becoming unresponsive while indexing large mail stores.

And while Thunderbird 3.0 had a number of nice new features such as the tabbed interface and improvements to search and the overall user interface these were largely useless thanks to endless hangs and spinning cursors.Particularly notorious for those connecting to Gmail was the "All Mail" folder that generally caused Thunderbird to hang, sometimes for hours.

Thunderbird 3.1 does not suffer from the same problems. In fact, based on the second - and presumably final - release candidate that just became available, it's what 3.0 should have been.