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The current version of Thunderbird is 3.0.3. And like Firefox, Thunderbird has many available add-ons written by many different individuals that can greatly enhance how you work with your email. Like most browsers that allow you to open multiple Web pages in tabs, Thunderbird now allows you to open emails and search results in new tabs. Thunderbird 3 brought many new features as well, including tabs for email. Thankfully, Thunderbird 3 remedied the oversight and works well with the OS X Address Book. Thunderbird could be strong in many areas, but forcing OS X users to keep two separate lists of email addresses was a hard pill for many to swallow. Because OS X has its own Address Book, which integrates with other services such as iChat, the missing Address Book support in Thunderbird 2 was an omission that kept many Mac users from giving it a try. Older versions of Thunderbird had very poor OS X support. Thunderbird is a good cross-platform email client, so if you do use multiple operating systems, perhaps using Thunderbird on all of them makes sense if you want your mail experience to be consistent. If you come from another operating system, such as Linux or Windows, you may be used to other email clients, such as Mozilla’s Thunderbird. For many, Apple Mail is sufficient for their needs. Mail can handle POP3, IMAP and Microsoft Exchange, provides decent filtering, and integrates with Address Book and iCal (the latter for tasks and TODO items). There are quite a few email clients for Mac OS X, but very few seamlessly mesh with the many features the OS X operating system provides, unless you use Apple’s Mail client.
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Vincent Danen takes a look at the Linux-based Thunderbird 3 and compares it to Apple Mail.
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If you work with multiple systems, a cross-platform email client can be convenient. How Thunderbird 3 works on Mac OS X: Better than Apple Mail?
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