The first alpha release of Thunderbird 3, the open source mail client built on the Gecko rendering engine (what Firefox and all other Mozilla products use), is now available as a developer preview. The Mozilla Messaging team has named this release "Shredder a1" to signify that this release is early, buggy and should NOT be used in a production environment. Mozilla is aiming this release at testers and developers and we don't recommend non-adventurous users taking the program out for a spin.

As the release notes point out, Shredder Alpha 1 is built on Gecko 1.9, the engine running Firefox 3.

Some other highlights:

• New add-on manager that allows direct installation of Thunderbird add-ons and customizations
• Mac OS X version is a native Cocoa application
• Improved message searching

Again, be aware that this is a developer preview and is certainly not ready for prime time. We had issues getting IMAP or POP support working with any of our Google Apps accounts on the OS X version of Shredder Alpha 1 and the app was kind of crashy. Still, we were impressed with what we could see and look forward to future developments.

If you feel ready to give the newest alpha a try, you can download it for your platform of choice here.

[via Mozilla Links]