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."

Lightning

[Nedmud]

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.

top posting

[kv9]

3. Quote Collapse: This allows you to collapse those pesky quotes that are at the bottom of every email. This is a must for people who are accustomed to using Gmail.

top posting is bad mkay?

wake up editors.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

A ways to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

A True Must Have

[fishdan]

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 the curve!

Re:Wait for Penelope !

[Overzeetop]

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:top posting

[mgblst]

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:Wait for Penelope !

[Tack]

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:inefficiency of splitting mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

Most computers have more memory availible now doesn't make loading who whole rendering engine and whatnot into memory multiple times. Its inefficient, and quite frankly silly.

Why not have each application plug into a single, standalone installation of XULRunner, or some such? Redundant libraries only get loaded once that way. It saves resources and boosts performance.

Firefox on its own already uses entirely too much memory. Throw in T-Bird, make it load much of the same libraries attributing to Firefox already eating up ridiculous amounts of memory, its absurd. It makes allot more sense to just share and load the same libs. Imagine if every other project did this, and you'd have eleventy billion copies of libc not only installed on your system, but loaded into memory, or if each KDE app installed and loaded an individual copy KDElibs into memory for each application, or if each GTK app installed and loaded its own GTK libs into memory?

It's inefficient, its a waste of resources, and that doesn't change just because its Mozilla doing it.

Re:top posting

[Anonymous Coward]

Difficult to read only if you have a retarded client that does not order textes by reply order.
I really HATE having to scroll down to see the actual interesting stuff just because an anal retentive dumbass think for whatever reason that I don't remember what I just have read in the previous post.
Basically quoting the full text a the end is just a reminder in case off you have a stupid newsgroup/mail client, or if you don't read a thread in the good order for whatever reason.
But for the majority, having to scroll through stuff they just read is stupid. So there is a reason they don't accept this stupid netiquette coming from old ages where intelligent client were not existing.

and by the way, if you want to enforce the first rule, alors enforce the second one, that is:don't fucking quote the whole text at all....

Re:top posting

[pwrtool 45]

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 if you're just a reader or if you're also a responder. People sending me email tend to want a response, so I prefer top-posting. YMMV.

top posting is bad mkay?

Re:A True Must Have

[gad_zuki!]

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:Wait for Penelope !

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

The GP wasn't talking about full bottom posting. He was referring to what I call "contextual inline quoting", which is the practice of deleting all of the quoted text, except for enough to give contextual reference, and then quoting inline.

I have no big beef with either top or bottom posting, provided that the author can be bothered to trim his fucking quotes. Since we live in a world where the vast majority of people can't be bothered to actually do so, the practice of fully-quoted top posting has become the norm. It doesn't help that practically every modern mail client encourages the practice. I will agree that fully-quoted bottom posting is an absolute abomination.

Provided that the author trims his quotes to a minimum, neither is all that annoying.

Re:top posting

[Anonymous Coward]

'Eh? What sort of fucked up reasoning is that? A lot of people inter-mingle their reply with the original text: what does your clever email client do then? Oh that's right, it fucks up the text for you.'
No, wrong, most people just quote your whole text THEN reply, ignoring all but the first rule of the 'netiquette'. So no real point in quoting at all exept to show what post they respond.
You know what, my client show me what the post respond to in the first place.
You don't have to scroll to read people who intermingle their answer, so this is not the point of the rant. And you can't inter mingle your answer if you only quote the text below your answer really, so this is unrelated.

People who just quote the whole text below their answer are actually the intelligent people.
They do not force people with intelligent client (the majority) to scroll down to read the answer.
And they still allow the minority with no client to know what post is responded in case they have a gold fish memory....

maybe I am not clear since english is not my first langage, but hell, consider this:the way netiquette is supposed to be better is NOT better for me, so hell with it.
What is considerered bad manners in some contries is good manners in others..no one is 'right' on that.
Netiquette is only right for some people, deal with it, it is not a law, stop trying to enforce it, cause you are at least wrong in this attitude.

Re:wake up editors.

[Aladrin]

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

When grammar/spelling-nazi'ing, please be sure your own post is correct first. At the very least, -1- of your 2 sentences could have been correct.

Re:inefficiency of splitting mozilla

[dkf]

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:top posting

[ChrTssu]

In my experience, I only need the gist of the preceding email to know what the responder is talking about. What I really need to know is what the responder is saying *right now.* Also, I don't know how many times a part of a message has been ignored or misread, leading to all kinds of confusion. It's easier if past messages are not truncated, so a clarifying (or simply repetitive) reply can be quickly and easily made just by selecting "Reply," rather than going through old correspondence looking for the error. So, ease of reading, and more information right at hand are why I choose to ignore others' netiquette.

Re:Purge Button

[cecil_turtle]

Are you serious? Thunderbird has better IMAP support than any other client I've used (Outlook / Outlook Express / Evolution / Opera / Sylpheed / Windows Mail / etc.). Set it up to move deleted items to your trash IMAP folder and have it clear the trash folder on exit. Deleted messages get out of your way and there's no extra step.

I don't understand why every other IMAP client just strikes out "deleted" messages - why would you want messages you DELETED to hang around in your way until you "purge" or "expunge" it?