Thunderbird 3 is scheduled to come out of beta next week. Mozilla Messaging has decided to release Thunderbird 3 Release Candidate on Monday next week. This release will mark the end of the beta version and the beginning of Release Candidate of Thunderbird 3. The last release of Thunderbird, was Thunderbird 3, beta 4.

[ For those who do not know, Thunderbird is a e-mail client from Mozilla. Like Firefox, it is free, open source and powered by Firefox. ]

Thunderbird has not been able to succeed in its sphere as much as Mozilla did in the browser market. The new Thunderbird will feature one of the features behind the popularity of Firefox. Thunderbird 3 RC1 will bring add-ons to the client. Initially, add-ons could be written for Thunderbird 2 as well, but this time, Mozilla Messaging promises a better integration. Some new features on offer are:

• An important add-on that Mozilla Messaging has plans of developing, is one which will check a twitter user and tell you if you can follow that user back, if he/she is following you.
• An add-on, seemingly is built-in to display calendars from Google and Yahoo calenders. This calendar will be rendered using the built-in Firefox engine, given that Thunderbird is Firefox based.
• The new version will also feature a new add-on named Lightening, which can be used to provide a calendar and also integrate with web-based calendars from Google and others for creating, managing and accepting event invitations, marking to-do jobs etc.
• Thunderbird 3 will feature inline search, which will look through the contents of a mail page to search for the query string or keywords and not just the title and tags. Search within folders has also improved. The search result can be filtered with time and place of occurrence of the search result like title, in-text or in tags.
• The mail can be archived and removed from Inbox like in Gmail.
• A new tabbed interface.

This list is only an overview. I will be able to provide more information once the RC is available on Monday. This marks the beginning of a new range of developers- Thunderbird add-on developers. The new features sure sound promising and will help increase Thunderbird’s appeal to more users.