After a few betas & as many release candidates, Mozilla has finally released Thunderbird 3.  It packs all kinds of new features like tabbed emails & a schpankity new search function.

I knew it was a bit of a crap-shoot with my twenty-some add-ons, but I was genuinely surprised to see that Lightning no longer worked when I did my update.  D’oh.  I definitely need my GCal sync back in TBird, so hopefully they’ll come up with an update soon.  I also freaked out a bit when I was in the default “smart folder” view, but it was simple enough to switch out of that view at the top of the left pane.  One final gripe is that the new IMAP sync process seems to be taking a while on the first go; not unexpected, but still a bit of a pain.

Go get you some scary early-adopter goodness here.

**Follow-up:  holy hell is the “synchronization” feature unbelievable.  I may not be a typical case, but I’ve got five IMAP accounts setup in Thunderbird, & after installing TBird 3.0, it automatically proceeded to “synchronize” all of my accounts (two of them GMail accounts with thousands of listserve emails).  Know what that does, boys ‘n girls?  It turns your accounts into a sort of POP3/IMAP mashup so that you can access your emails “offline.”  I couldn’t even get the program to slow down long enough to stop it from trying to “download” multiple tens of thousands of messages (locally, to my PC), so I had to kill it from the task manager… twice.  At any rate, I finally managed to get the settings changed so it would quit downloading all my emails, but it’s still going ahead & indexing them (something that’s needed for the new search feature).

I have my accounts setup as IMAP for a reason!  I’m sure I’m mostly to blame for this, since I really only glossed over the “synchronization” settings, but here’s hoping this warning will save someone else out there from making the same mistake.  I’m seriously questioning why this setting would be the default…

**Update – as you can read in this post, the Lightning/Sunbird team is hard at work on the compatible release.  I just downloaded & installed the latest nightly build & it’s working so far.  They also have a nightly build for the Google calendar provider available.  The only hiccup I’ve noticed is that creating a new event (in my “Home” calendar) won’t show the event on the main calendar page, but it does show in the “Today pane”).  Other than that, I’m happily back in action.