Tame Your Email With Thunderbird
Thunderbird Extensions You Don’t Want To Live Without
Thunderbird is great straight out of the box, however, the beauty of this software is that you can make it even better with just a few handy extensions.
MozBackup - don’t leave home without it. I repeat: Do NOT leave home without it. This handy tool will quickly back up your Mozilla profiles (works not only with Thunderbird, but also Firefox and Mozilla). It’s more than just a good idea to back up your profile before making any changes to your programs, such as adding/removing extensions. Trust Me.
Minimize to Tray - (Windows only). This nifty extension allows you to minimize Thunderbird (and Firefox) to your system tray when not in use instead of actually closing out the software. Now you can receive your email without Thunderbird taking up any room on your taskbar.
Signature - Easily store text that you type often. Save minutes off your emailing time just by right-clicking and selecting the appropriate ’signature’. And don’t let the name fool you, I personally use this extension for ‘canned’ text which I would otherwise need to type regularly (almost better than macros).
QuickText - Essentially the same thing as signature except it’s a little more configurable, but less intuitive to get set up (the detailed instructions on the homepage definitely help).
QuoteCollapse - Yes, there are people out there who do not trim their messages. And sometimes there are times when you don’t actually need to read the quoted text. This plugin truncates the quoted portion of the message and if you wish to read it, just click on the little ‘+’ sign.
about:config - when you figure out what you’re doing, this handy little extension lets you quickly update “behind the scenes” features in Thunderbird. Definitely good to have around for making quick updates.
Folderpane Tools - The plugin which lets you rearrange the order of your Thunderbird folders and default email account.
Calendar - Mozilla does have a stand alone version of the Calendar (called Sundbird), however, a key feature - for me anyway - does not work with it, email alarms. If you’d like to receive an email message when your alarm goes off, then it’s best to get the Thunderbird extension of Calendar. It has its quirks, but I’ll get into those when I do the write up on Mozilla Sunbird.
While all of the plugins I’ve linked to go directly to the plugin homepage, they can all be downloaded from addons.mozilla.org
Tom wrote,
okay, okay! I’ll try it!
Comment Link | May 21st, 2005 at 9:17 pmteli wrote,
Don’t forget to let us know how you get on with it
Comment Link | May 23rd, 2005 at 3:42 pmPhill wrote,
Fantastic Teli
Personally I love thunderbird, and had only recently found the crossover theme, the only problem I had was that it didn’t work with the calendar extension, and so ended up downloading Sunbird instead, but otherwise it’s fantastic, especially for sorting your mail and it’s junk filter, definitely better than OE. There’s one thing you forgot to mention, on the fly plain text to HTML viewing through the view menu, it’s so much more flexible than OE’s rigid one or the other approach, I would give it 10/10
Comment Link | May 27th, 2005 at 4:19 pmteli wrote,
Thanks Phill,
I’ve heard a lot of people say that about the Cross Over theme, that it’s not compatible with the Calendar, but it works just dandy with mine (maybe he upgraded the plugin when I wasn’t looking :D)
And you’re right…the plain text to HTML viewing on the fly is much better than OE.
Comment Link | May 27th, 2005 at 5:33 pm