Users around the world can now get their hands on the latest version of Mozilla's open source e-mail client Thunderbird 2.0, which is designed to make it much easier to organise and find messages thanks to tags and advanced folder view functionality.
Release candidate 1 (RC1) of the new client became available last week, which gave users more insight into what they could expect from the final version.
In addition to enhanced tagging and search features, users can also make use of navigation akin to what they're used to from a browser so that they can move forward and backwards through their messages quickly and easily.
What's more, hundreds of add-ons are available to make it even easier to customise Thunderbird, which is available as a free download for Linux, Mac and Windows in more than 30 languages, to their individual needs.
"Thunderbird 2 has powerful new features and proven security, delivering an improved e-mail experience to users worldwide," says Scott MacGregor, lead engineer for Thunderbird at Mozilla.
"In Thunderbird 2.0, we incorporated the proven benefits of tagging to e-mail. Tagging initially gained popularity on blogs, photo and link-sharing sites as an intuitive way to organise online information so users could easily find desired content."
The free-to-download-and-use application was always tipped to launch mid-month, but as the organisation doesn't make money out of the software it creates, it would have happily pushed back the official launch if necessary, according to Tristan Nitot, Mozilla's president of Europe.
"Right now we are busy putting the last touches to Thunderbird 2.0 and, if everything is right, we expect to ship it around mid April," he said in an interview with IT PRO earlier this month.
