It works as expected, though it's difficult to gauge its power against malware, as it's rarely a threat. I had a recurring problem with one web site's advertising and by the time I go to the Quarantine area to delete the malware, it disappeared from the dialog box.

I'm not sure if that's typical behavior or not but I haven't been worried.

The update system isn't happy with the way I connect to the internet, so I may or may not get updates. I use a mobile broadband connection, so when I change users or re-boot, it expects the connection and it is generally not there. I check the last date of updates and find that it might be a week ago.

Check for Update has never worked. I'd like to be able to check and download the application under my control but instead, Google Updater will download it at some unknown time when I need the bandwidth.

Face detection is relatively good and I'm surprised when it recognizes so many faces already in the database.

I wish they'd change the scroll bars and make it a native application, rather than a WINE-connected Windows application.

Is version 10.1.102.64 a preview?

You might want to let people know in bold type, so that they don't download something by mistake that they don't want.

Please fix your website so that it's less confusing when handling previews, alpha and beta test versions. Putting early versions in the hands of the unknowing isn't a good thing.

The final release for version 3.1 is available as is Lightning 1.0b2 that is compatible with version 3.1.

For the most part, the upgrade to version 3.0 was a good one.

Searching has changed dramatically and confused me at first. By default, Thunderbird 3 searches everywhere rather than searching by sender or subject as previous versions did. Clicking within the search field allows you to select the earlier default.

The other dramatic change is the combined inbox. There was a rather pesky problem with this. I would delete an e-mail and it would not skip to the next e-mail in the list. That's been corrected as of version 3.0.1.

Something that has stopped people from upgrading to version 3 was the lack of Lightning compatibility. That was rectified recently by version 1.0b1 of the Lightning extension.

As always, there will be room for enhancement and version 3.0.2 has been in nightly builds for a week or so. I believe that most people who need a capable e-mail client will find it very usable and those upgrading will now be happy with version 3.0.1.