Must-Have Extensions for Thunderbird 2.0

Operator writes "While Firefox has been in the spotlight for some time now, Thunderbird has yet to enjoy the same wide adoption or glowing praise despite being an excellent email client. It's no surprise that a popular topic has been Firefox's best (and worst) extensions while Thunderbird add-ons have gone largely unnoticed. In celebration of the recent release of Thunderbird 2.0 here are the best extensions for the program along with some honorable mentions."

enigmail extension

[UnixSphere (820423)]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon /71 [mozilla.org]

Enigmail adds OpenPGP message encryption and authentication to your email client. It features automatic encryption, decryption and integrated key management functionality. Enigmail requires GnuPG (www.gnupg.org) for the cryptographic functions. Note: GnuPG is not part of the installation.

A True Must Have

[fishdan (569872)]

I agree, and in fact for me the article lost credibility for recommending against Enigmail -- Enigmail is a must have. If we're ever going to have digital signatures become the norm (something I'd like to see) then the advanced users are going to have to model it for the neophytes. Digitally sign every email you send, and when people ask why you do it, spoof an "I'm joining a cult" email from them to their friends. I'm pretty confident that eventually only signed emails will be delivered -- be ahead of t

Re:

[Threni (635302)]

> If we're ever going to have digital signatures become the norm (something I'd like to see)

Most email users have never had anyone try and fake messages from them to other people. I can see the advantages, but non-nerds aren't going to jump through hoops to add the required encryption subsystem to their email systems when it offers no advantage. I can see encryption itself being marginally more popular, but not much so.

Re:

[keithius (804090)]

Most email users have never had anyone try and fake messages from them to other people.

Errr... what? People get spam emails all the time with the "From" address faked - often from people they know, and sometimes even from themselves! (There's a strange feeling when you get an obviously junk/spam email and it claims to have been sent by... you!)

Re:A True Must Have

[CheShACat (999169)]

"Most email users have never had anyone try and fake messages from them to other people" Having spent some time working at an ISP and ICANN domain registrar, I know that pretty much anyone with a domain name has had their email spoofed at one time or another, if not all day every day. While this might not actually cover "most email users", the rest run the risk of their email domain (e.g. hotmail.com) being spoofed by spammers. In the case of spoofed emails, it's often the recipient that is at most risk, digital signatures that allow a recipient to verify that a mail's source was actually the domain it claims to be from are a great help in combatting spam.

Re:A True Must Have

[gad_zuki! (70830)]

Your friends probably dont need military grade public key cryptography along with a confusing install. Enigmail is pretty much the GUI for gpgp for thunderbird. Most users wont get past the point of "where do I click to make this email magically unreadedable to George bush!?!?" Its probably a lot easier to use the buit-in s/mime support in thunderbird than to add more confusing crypto products.

Oh course, considering the number of people who have shifted to webmail, its going to be interesting to see if any of these big webmail providers begin to support crytopgrahy. Are people going to trust google, yahoo, or hotmail with their private key? Do they even know what this means?

Sadly, the encrypt email revolution never happened (poor phil zimmerman) and thanks to webmail and an apathetic public it probably never will.

Re:

[digitalchinky (650880)]

Then why not use IMAP instead? It's frustratingly slow at times, just like web mail, with the added convenience that your messages are stored safely on a server somewhere out in the world.

Lightning

[Nedmud (157169)]

It's not complete yet, but it's already worth using it, IMO. Having a calendar integrated with my mail helps me to check my schedule as regularly as I check my mail.

Re:

[thsths (31372)]

> It's not complete yet, but it's already worth using it

It is better than nothing, but it is not a proper calendar either. BTW, is there any way to get rid of it temporarily if I don't want to use it? It takes up so much space that could have better use sometimes.

Anyway, if you need a real calendar, you have to go for a more powerful solution, such as Gmail, KMail, Evolution or Outlook. Note that the later two programs suck quite a lot.

Re:Lightning

[ppz003 (797487)]

> It's not complete yet, but it's already worth using it

It is better than nothing, but it is not a proper calendar either. BTW, is there any way to get rid of it temporarily if I don't want to use it? It takes up so much space that could have better use sometimes.

Anyway, if you need a real calendar, you have to go for a more powerful solution, such as Gmail, KMail, Evolution or Outlook. Note that the later two programs suck quite a lot.

From an article not too long ago, you can use Google Calendar in Lightning [mozilla.org] or Sunbird nightlies [mozilla.org].

dispMUA - Display Mail User Agent

[xTK-421x (531992)]

I find this extension to be helpful when dealing with certain email issues. It displays an icon representing the user's email software if it's in the known list of mail agents.

Home Page: http://cweiske.de/misc_extensions.htm [cweiske.de]

Extension Link: http://www.cweiske.de/files/download/misc/dispmua- 1.3.2.xpi [cweiske.de]

List of Supported Agents: http://cweiske.de/misc_extensions_dispmuas.htm [cweiske.de]

The list

[hywel_ap_ieuan (892599)]

The extensions in TFA, which is a one-pager: Minimize to Tray, Quicktext, Quote Collapse, Nostalgy.

Runners-up: Dictionary Switcher, View Headers Toggle Button, Contacts Sidebar.

It also mentions "Mozilla has three recommended extensions, Foxytunes, Enigmail, and an adblocker"

Wait for Penelope !

[Rastignac (1014569)]

Now that the great Eudora is dead (no more updated), the Penelope project will bring Eudora's goodies to Thunderbird.
Just wait for Penelope, a better Thunderbird than Thunderbird !

Re:Wait for Penelope !

[Overzeetop (214511)]

Ahhh, you young kids are so amusing. The "correct" way to quote is to add your discussion after the text you're quoting. You should also snip out the parts of the email which you are not replying to. You see, that way you can actually read the discussion from top to bottom, just like a book, and have all the relavent information in proper order. Proper netiquette which, apparently, nobody remembers or follows.

Now get off my lawn.

Re:Wait for Penelope !

[Tack (4642)]

You see, that way you can actually read the discussion from top to bottom, just like a book, and have all the relavent information in proper order. Proper netiquette which, apparently, nobody remembers or follows.

I used to feel this way too, being one of the more pedantic, elitist, hardcore, old school netiquette snobs around. However after having lived in the real world for a while, I find the practice of full bottom posting to be far more annoying than full top posting (where "full" means the entire quoted text is preserved).

On a mailing list or active thread among many people, it quickly becomes tiresome to constantly scroll down to the start of the reply for every new email that comes in. My old school snobbery still insists that the proper method is to prune your quoted reply text to the relevant context and reply inline. But for those who are too lazy to do this (nearly everyone except us throwbacks) and as a result end up quoting the entire email, I find in this case top posting to be far more practical and sensible than bottom posting.

Re:

[Wite_Noiz (887188)]

there is so much more features in Outlook

Unless I'm mistaken, Thunderbird replaces Outlook Express, not Outlook.
There are huge differences between those two.

I agree that I'd like Thunderbird to handle more of Outlook's work, but there are extensions (like Lightening) that are slowly doing that.

the answer was at the bottom

At least put some effort in!
Account Settings > [account] > Composition & Addressing > Select: start my reply above the quote

Personally, I use Thunderbird because I find it very quick and easy to use.
I do get the occasional inbox/email corrupti

Quote collapse

[Dachannien (617929)]

Alternatively, you can use my preferred method for eliminating the giant 200-line quoted message bombs that appear below a two-word response. Just bitch at the person repeatedly until they either start deleting the old e-mail quotes themselves or they just stop e-mailing you. Either way, problem solved.

Sloooooooo.....oooow

[mwvdlee (775178)]

I've recently tried Thunderbird 2 on a WinXP system, where I'd like it to replace Outlook Express. Feature-wise Thunderbird 2 seems to offer everything I need and it wasn't too hard to find them. However, Thunderbird 2 seems a lot slower than Outlook Express. Another annoyance was that Thunderbird 2 orders mails by send date, not received date: Spam often has a bullshit received date, making them pop-up all over my inbox, instead of neatly at the end where I can filter them out more easily. Even though I bl

Order by send date.

[140Mandak262Jamuna (970587)]

Isn't that a feature, not a bug? The malformed date tag is a spam indicator. So it is good Thunderbird will put it at the top of the list, out of sight. Just mark the folder read. If you have legitimate correspondent using legal software has wrong dates, it is because his/her machine is riddled with viruses. So dont want to read their mail either. For a long time Outlook express used to mess up the subject tag and in Thunderbird (older versions) the subject line was missing, and thus filed in spam folder. A

Re:

[mwvdlee (775178)]

How can you say Thunderbird is right sorting e-mails the way it does, when I want it differently? Is that the level of user-friendliness one is to expect of Thunderbird; "my way or the high way"? Besides; it's not uncommon for legitimate e-mail to have old dates. For instance when it has been sitting in somebody's outbox for a number of days. I guess if Thunderbird thinks it should force it's ideas on me instead of letting me work the way I want, I'll just not use Thunderbird any more.

Order by is configurable

[sidney (95068)]

You can order by receive date. Click on the icon on the right side of the column header of the preview pane to see all the column headings that are available, and select "Order Received". That adds a column to the display which is a message number that is incremented as each message is received.

You can sort messages by the contents of any column by clicking on the column header. Click again to sort in the opposite order. So once you have an Order Received column, click on its heading to have messages sorted by the received date instead of the Send Date. The sort order you select is remembered when you exit and restart Thunderbird.

Re:

[gfxguy (98788)]

Well, you should work on training the built in spam-filter, then.

Moreover, while it doesn't have a "recieved date", it does have an "order received" field, which means you can sort by that with the same results as sorting by recieved date.

wake up editors.

[by Anonymous Coward]

how on earth did this dire article make it through the editors process?
Its of abysmal quality and precious little substance.

2 in a row?

[Turn-X Alphonse (789240)]

Taco are you trying to feed the trolls?

Slashdot : news for nerds, payed fpr by Mozilla and Google.

Because it sucks?

[thsths (31372)]

Sorry to be so blunt, I'll try to explain what I mean. Whichever way you look at it, Firefox is the gold standard of browsers. It is more standard compliant and easier to use than IE, more compatibly than Konqueror, and much more extensible and better looking than Opera. While you can find better browsers for niche applications (lynx on telnet), there is no general purpose browser that comes even close to Firefox.

Thunderbird on the other hand is just a lot of promises. It still uses folders, while labels are obviously the way to go. Threading is poor. Integration between different message sources is basically non-existent. The search function sucks really badly. There is no integration with any reasonable calender (and don't call sunbird reasonable). And it is actually difficult to use, certainly compared to the competition (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, Opera, KMail...).

I mean seriously: can Thunderbird even sort threads on the date of the most recent message in a thread? Last time I tried it could not. GMail does that by default, and it is by far the most sensible way to order messages. Make Thunderbird not suck, and I will give it another try.

TB thread sorting (was Re:Because it sucks?)

[cspruck (28447)]

can Thunderbird even sort threads on the date of the most recent message in a thread?

If I understand the above: View > Sort By > choose Date, Descending (or Ascending if you want), and Threaded

Options usually work if you just try them. :-)

Re:Because it sucks?

[LWATCDR (28044)]

Tunderbird V2 adds tags but frankly I like folders. I do not see how tags are obviously the way to go. In fact that is the one thing I don't like about Gmail.
Yes you can sort however you like. It really isn't a problem.
And so far the search works well for me.
Kmail and Evolution only run on Linux and I have to use Windows.
Outlook has caused me more grief with blown PSTs and other issues than I can shake a stick at and it only runs on Windows and I have to use Linux.
Gmail and Yahoo mail? They are not bad but I need to access my office email server.
Thunderbird while not perfect.. Get a good calander interface going guys. Is a good email client. It just isn't a good calender client.

I have yet to see as complete of a solution as Outlook+Exchange yet. I am just not willing to pay the price to use Exchange.

Re:

[Fred_A (10934)]

I use TB as well and regularly switch between it and Kmail on the same machine (I keep my mail on my IMAP server) and I'm not too happy with TB either. Granted TB is just a mail app and not a piece of a groupware suite (like Kontact is) but a bit of openness would indeed help it (beyond LDAP which is a pain to setup just for that purpose).

A ways to go...

[by Anonymous Coward]

You know that Thunderbird has a ways to go when the #1 extension is minimize to tray??

Anyone know of an extension

[Rogerborg (306625)]

That allows message filters to run on the body of IMAP messages? That's pretty basic functionality for Thunderbird to still be missing, given how long it's been a known issue. And yes, I've tried the "might work-arounds", and they don't.

gmail

[prockcore (543967)]

After fighting with Evolution and Thunderbird, I've given up. I just have gmail pop all my mail. Not only does this eliminate the hassle of checking my mail from multiple machines, but gmail actually handles meeting requests properly. (Evolution never seems to recognize the timezones of any meeting requests I get... so all the meetings were scheduled for the wrong time, and Evolution wouldn't even let me change them).

Virtual Identity

[ccarr.com (262540)]

Virtual Identity [mozilla.org] is essential if you, like many of us, maintain more addresses per inbox than can be conveniently managed via Thunderbirds's stock identity manager.

Obligatory end-to-end commentary

[IGnatius T Foobar (4328)]

Before some random dork starts spouting about how Thunderbird sux0rs because open source doesn't have an end-to-end Outlook/Exchange replacement...

Thunderbird+Lightning connected to a Citadel server [citadel.org] does the job quite nicely. Mail, calendar, contacts, all server-side and end-to-end, 100 percent open source.

Thanks for asking. :)

TagZilla

[T.E.D. (34228)]

The only add-on I use is TagZilla [mozdev.org], which adds a randomly selected tagline from a file to every email. I'm so attached to this that I won't upgrade to newer versions of Thunderbird until TagZilla supports them.

I have people ask me all the time how I get those randomly selected tags on my emails. Of course the answer starts with "First off, you have to be using Thunderbird..." :-)

External Editor

[crabbz (986605)]

No one mentioned the External Editor [globs.org] extension yet? Nice to be able to kick off your favorite editor without cut-n-pasting. Something every mail client should have, but maybe I'm just old fashioned.

Forget the extensions, improve the app!

[MidnightBrewer (97195)]

I recently downloaded Thunderbird 2.0 and was surprised to see that it was basically the same application as before, except that the icons were slightly prettier and I could no longer find the junk mail controls. Address book handling is still obsolete, as well as editing entries (editing a person's name is awkward, as typing a first and last name may actually require you to edit *three* fields - go figure.) One particular annoyance is that you can only store two emails for each contact. Many of my close friends have work, home, and cell phone, so this is a bit of an annoyance for me. Rule editing is also crufty; you cannot move rules across mail accounts, and there is no way to base a new rule off of an old one - also, basing a rule off of a message is only useful if it is set to filter based on that particular sender's address. Threading is over-complicated, split across two sub-menus, and rife with unnecessary options that usually end up with new users unintentionally hiding their emails.

I have always had a soft spot for the children of Netscape, but Thunderbird hasn't seen a serious reworking since it was split off from the original program. Let me know when the developers release a serious update, and I'll take another look. Until then, I will continue to use the PortableApp version of Thunderbird to check my email at work; it's not that it doesn't work, it's just that it lacks elegance.

Re:inefficiency of splitting mozilla

[dkf (304284)]

I still don't understand why I need to have multiple copies of gecko shared libraries / dlls in memory since the split-up of mozilla into firefox, thunderbird, and sunbird. How is this waste of space supposed to be more efficient?

It's because it makes distribution much simpler. If this bothers you (though why it should when even entry-level machines have vast amounts of memory available even after loading the OS) get Seamonkey instead and stop griping here.

Re:inefficiency of splitting mozilla

[dkf (304284)]

It makes allot more sense to just share and load the same libs.

Nice dream. Doesn't work too well unfortunately except in highly centralized distribution schemes like those used by Linux distributions. Since the primary distribution mode of FF/TB is by direct user download, it is better for those programs to go out with the libraries that they need so that they work for people. The alternative, pitching ordinary users into library versioning hell, is far worse.

In other words: Theory? Meet Real World Practice. Practice? Say Hi to Ivory-Tower Theory.

Re:

[SCHecklerX (229973)]

While we're slightly off-topic, my vote goes to sylpheed [sraoss.jp]

I use it at home on my linux box, and it runs just fine as a portable app (sylpheed --configdir=foo) from the USB stick when forced to use somebody else's computer on the road (IMAP over SSL along with SMTP Auth and SMTP with Starttls to my home server).

A very nice lightweight mail client, with some good improvements to the UI in the 2.4 version that was recently released.

If you enjoy having more crap built-in (like rendering HTML), check out claws, wh

Re:

[Ginger Unicorn (952287)]

you can just copy what you want out of the profiles folder/mail store folder and paste it back in if you need to.

Re:KMail

[Max von H. (19283)]

Just use MozBackup [jasnapaka.com] to backup and restore. Works with Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Suite and Netscape.

It allows you to backup and restore bookmarks, mail, contacts, history, extensions, cache etc.

Been using it for ages, it's one of the handiest tools I've got.

Cheers!

Re:KMail

[MobyDisk (75490)]

I've used Thunderbird for years... and it quite regularly corrupts my local mail store. I have a bag of tricks for dealing with it. It is always in very minor ways though: Can't delete attachments, can't find an email via search even though it is there. A few messages that sort wrong, etc. The problem with most of these is they are intermittent so I can't reproduce them reliably any more.

Re:

[gfxguy (98788)]

I agree... unfortunately, everyone at work does it. So if I start at the bottom, and the email goes back and forth several times, you simply can't follow it anymore. It must have been outlook that started that nonsense.

Re:top posting

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

I fully concur. I can't stand top-posting, but I have to deal with it (and do it myself), otherwise everyone at work bitches about how I'm "intentionally being difficult"...

I agree... unfortunately, everyone at work does it. So if I start at the bottom, and the email goes back and forth several times, you simply can't follow it anymore. It must have been outlook that started that nonsense.

Re:top posting

[sarathmenon (751376)]

I fully concur. I can't stand top-posting, but I have to deal with it (and do it myself), otherwise everyone at work bitches about how I'm "intentionally being difficult"...

I agree... unfortunately, everyone at work does it. So if I start at the bottom, and the email goes back and forth several times, you simply can't follow it anymore. It must have been outlook that started that nonsense.

Yup, you definitely hate top posting.

Re:top posting

[mgblst (80109)]

Why is top posting bad? If it is a conversation you are all involved in, then you shouldn't even need to scroll down. I came from a camp of bottom posters, but now I just want the email relating to me at the top. I don't see a problem anymore, and I am quite happy to ignore the previously sent emails, so they should be at the bottom.

Re:

[Sax Maniac (88550)]

than top-post.
It's better to remove all quotes
which is a freaking pain in the ass.
message backwards
then I have read your
If you top-post,
we read top to bottom.
Because in English

Re:top posting

[Stavr0 (35032)]

Because it's difficult to read.

On 2007.04.25 9:35 Stavr0 wrote:
> Why is top posting bad?
>
> On 2007.04.25 8:40, KV9 wrote:
> > top posting is bad mkay?
>

Re:

[pwrtool 45 (792547)]

Gah. This sounds like countless conversations that have long been done to death on Usenet all over again.

Some of us don't want to have to reread or needlessly scroll through the entirety of multiple emails to get to the most recent response(s). Especially in longer conversations involving several people. If you've forgotten what the email was about, then you can do your scrolling. Otherwise, the part you need (the most recent bit) is right there in front of you. Efficiency!

But I guess that depends on i

Whats wrong?

[Bob54321 (911744)]

I use the webmail extension to check my hotmail account. The only time I have had problems in the last year was when hotmails interface changed but that was fixed in a day.