Thunderbird 3.0 beta 3 shipped!

It’s true, after a lot of hard work, and a few hard decisions, the first version of Thunderbird that has code of mine in it has shipped. Dan Mosedale has some comments on what’s changed. If you like Thunderbird, please download it, give it a try, and let me know what you think!

On a more personal note, the thing I did on this release that I’m the most proud of was to add a button that lets you reply to a mailing list.

I’m proud of it because it feels like a neat-but-still-usable UI, and because it is one more step on the road to getting people to change their mailing lists to not munge the Reply-To header. (With this patch, you are given the option of replying to the list, or the author. Unless the list has set the Reply-To to point to the list, in which case you can only mail the list.)

A couple of the other areas I worked on for this release were updating the Activity Manager so that it didn’t hang when you clicked “Clear Now”, and so that it merged a bunch of move/copy/delete notifications into a single notification that told you how many messages had been processed; and fixing a some layout and logic bugs in the Autoconfig dialog (which you get to from “File » New » Mail Account (Quick Setup)…”). Yeah, the Autoconfig dialog is still kind of ugly, but it’s better now than it used to be, and I’m working on making it prettier for beta 4.