It turned out that a few weeks were really more like a few minutes. Mozilla Messaging has released the first alpha of Shredder, the code name of Thunderbird 3.

As planned, this new release has the main goal of letting Thunderbird users that its email client is alive and healthy and this alpha packs a year of work since the last major Thunderbird release.

Like Firefox 3, Shredder Alpha 1 is based on Gecko 1.9 featuring the same memory improvements we have seen suring its development. It also brings one of its limitations: Thunderbird 3 will be available for Windows 2000 and later Windows releases. Windows 95/98/Me users are out.

While at this stage, any feature can hardly be considered final (think Places in Firefox 2), there’s some interesting stuff to look at:

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