As announced on CyberNet News earlier this week, Mozilla updated the Thunderbird 2 Roadmap. With this update is a revision of the release schedule and some of the features (more on this shortly). Now keep in mind for the past couple months it has been a ‘pre-beta’ release status. The revised schedule is as follows:

• Beta 1 ~ Early December 2006
• Beta 2 ~ Early January 2007
• RC(s) ~ February 2007
• Final Release ~ First Quarter 2007

Now, back to the features:

• Tools for organizing and managing e-mail
  • Custom Folder Pane Views such as favorites, unread and recently used.
  • Message Tagging
  • Tabbed Messages
• Be Informative
  • New Mail Alert Improvements
  • Folder Summary Popups
• Help Fight Junk Mail
  • Improve the current Bayesian based algorithm
  • Token Store Pruning / Aging

The one feature that many of us are anxiously awaiting would be the Tabbed Messages. In a nutshell instead of having each message(when clicked) appear in its window, they would appear in tabs (just like Firefox) instead. In regards to some of the other features,the message tagging is nice and is useful for organizing messages. Junk/Scam Mail still needs a lot of work, but seems to work a bit better (than in 1.5) in the Pre-Beta builds I have been using. Not too sure what the “custom folder pane views” are and not even sure if this feature has already been released.

Some of the comments on CyberNet were that Mozilla is neglecting Thunderbird in favor of Firefox. I don’t think this is quite true, granted when Firefox 1.5 came out so did Thunderbird 1.5. However, I do believe there was a greater importance put on getting Firefox 2 out given that Microsquish was going to be putting out IE7. Now that Firefox 2 has been release more attention can be turned towards Thunderbird. Then again I am thinking that Thunderbird 2 is being worked on by a different team than that of which did Firefox 2.