As you might guess from the codename, this is a very early developer version of the next generation mail client that is not intended for production use.

Shredder Alpha 1 builds on the Gecko 1.9 platform which also provides the underpinnings for Firefox 3. The primary goal of the recently released alpha version is to discover to what extent the platform will cooperate gracefully with Thunderbird.

Besides a completely new basis, minor changes have been made to the interface. For example, Thunderbird 3 now includes an add-on manager for easy installation of extensions. Additionally, the address book now imports data from the Mac OS X system address book, although this feature is disabled by default. Besides an enhanced crash reporter and an optimized search function, the Javascript code is also said to be much quicker.

Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 is available for downloading from the Mozilla Messaging homepage.

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