The Thunderbird development community aims to releases the first alpha release of Thunderbird 3.0 next month.

According to a story on Ars Technica, Thunderbird is slated to use Gecko 1.9, the new rendering engine found in Firefox 3.0. The email client will also receive a visual overhaul to improve usability. David Ascher from Mozilla says in his blog:

We’ve started defining what Thunderbird 3 will be, because we think that there is enough consensus to make some of the first decisions on the most important changes to tackle first. Specifically, Thunderbird 3 will build on the great base that is Thunderbird 2 (and the work already performed in trunk by the current and past contributors), and add some key features, such as:

• integrated calendaring (building on the great work done by the Mozilla Calendar team and their Lightning add-on to Thunderbird),
• better search facilities,
• easier configuration,
• and a set of other user interface improvements.

What each of those means in practice will be worked out in public, on blogs, mailing lists, and newsgroups, as transparently as possible.

Ascher also says it is time for Thunderbird development to catch up to Firefox. Good to hear.