As a long-time Thunderbird user I began using Thunderbird for it's IMAP capability some five years ago. IMAP has been gradually replacing POP3 as the dominant email protocol and is most notably known for the behavior of storing your email in online server folders, similar to Exchange server, but mostly in the cloud. In many ways IMAP was on the leading edge of cloud computing and remains so today, but that's another article.

What I like about Thunderbird 3 is the new tabbed interface and tighter integration with Lighting, the Mozilla Foundation's calendar integration for Thunderbird. The new tabbed interface allows for the calendar, open emails and other views to be automatically docked in tabs across the top of the page. An interface much like the tabbed browsing made popular by (but not invented by) Firefox.

The Lightning calendar feels more native to the interface in Thunderbird 3 and the Google Calendar integration feels quicker but that could be me.

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