In early May, the first alpha of Postbox 2.0 was released. Unfortunately, this news wasn’t reported by any news outlet or blog.

Postbox 2.0 is set to include a few new, much requested features. Notably:

• Account Groups / Universal Inbox – Postbox 2.0 will give users the ability to create account groups, starting with “All Accounts.” This emulates a universal inbox for users that want it and allows the flexibility of creating “Personal” and “Work” groups and having universal inboxes for them each group.
• Improved Indexing Performance – Searching is now much faster, especially for users with thousands of messages.
• Focus Pane – A new focus pane has been added, moving the “topics” area away from the folder pane.

It’s unclear how many alphas the Postbox team expects to ship, but their speed of releasing has been much faster than the Thunderbird team. Postbox, of course, is the startup founded by Scott MacGregor and Sherman Dickman, both former Mozilla Corporation (MoCo) employees. Their team includes Seth Spitzer, a long time Netscaper and former MoCo employee as well.