thoughts on mozilla

Yesterday, Postbox launched an “Express” version of their product, available as a free download. Postbox Express removes a number of features from its more mature brother, giving users a taste of what the Postbox offers. Their blog post includes a FAQ that answers many questions about Postbox Express.

Related, Postbox added a new page on their site detailing why users should switch from Mozilla Messaging’s Thunderbird to Postbox Express in ten eleven reasons.

Postbox 1.1.5 was released earlier today by the Postbox team. This release updates the Gecko backend and includes numerous bug fixes. You can download the latest version from Postbox’s website or by doing a “Check for Updates” inside Postbox itself.

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.