The Mozilla Foundation has announced that the latest version of its Thunderbird email system will be out this month.

The release candidate version of Thunderbird 3 will be out next week and the company expects the final version to be released by mid-November.

Mozilla said that 2,000 individual improvements have been made to the system. Chief among these is a new search tool that uses an SQL back end but a Mozilla-developed algorithm.

Users can search multiple email accounts and then filter research by the date the email was sent or received, by whom it was received or directed to, and by keywords.

Other improvements include a host of new skins for the platform, tabbed email to allow for multiple displays simultaneously and improved archiving.

Mozilla is also expecting a boost in takeup from the recent launch of Windows 7.

“The fact that Windows 7 was launched with no native email client is very encouraging,” Mozilla's director of marketing told V3.co.uk.

“It'll give a lot of users more of a chance to try out Thunderbird and see for themselves.”