Viewpoint from the Web

On its own Mozilla Thunderbird is quite a decent email client. However, there are a number of add-ons that add some useful new features as well as ones already present in the competition.

Lightning

Lightning is part of the Mozilla Calendar Project that upgrades Thunderbird to a full Personal Information Manager. It allows you to manage your daily schedule (events and tasks) directly within Thunderbird. It is tightly integrated with Thunderbird, allowing you to easily perform email-related calendaring tasks e.g. send or receive meeting invitations via email as well as sync with google calendar with an additional add-on. There are also holiday calendars published for a large number of countries.

Links:

• Addon Page
• Project URL
• Google Calendar addon
• Holiday Calendars

Dictionary

The default installation of Thunderbird does not include any dictionaries. I don’t know why they don’t include any since they already do locale specific downloads. But it’s simple enough to get a dictionary if one is available for your language. Once you’ve installed the dictionary, go into the preferences (“options” in the windows version) and enable spell-check in the composition section. You may have to select the correct language, if you have more than one installed.

Links:

• Addon Page
• British English Dictionary

Webmail

As the name suggests, this allows you to access your webmail from Thunderbird. It appears in the application just like any other account.

Currently it supports only Yahoo, Hotmail, Lycos (Europe), MailDotCom, Gmail, Libero, and AOL domains.

Links:

• Addon Page

Enigmail

Enigmail adds OpenPGP based message encryption and digital signature authentication to Thunderbird. You can use it to digitally sign emails that you send, and automatically encrypt emails if you have the recipients public key. It will also verify the authenticity of emails from them if they digitally sign them.

However, the people you are emailing must also have PGP based email encryption/signing.
It requires GnuPG to be installed on your computer, which is not included with the addon.

Links:

• Addon Page
• GnuPG

Allow HTML Temp

With this addon you can have Thunderbird show emails in text (or simple html) mode by default. When you get an html email you want to read in its full glory, you can view it in html mode with a single click. When switching to another message, it will be shown automatically again in your default mode. This saves Thunderbird from loading all the html bits and pieces everytime you click on an html email making it a lot quicker, and saves you from confirming your email address to spammers.

Please note that the button for this addon does not automatically appear in your toolbar after you install it. You will need to “customise” your toolbar to include the button.

Links:

• Addon Page

Correct Identity

Ever sent mail from the wrong email address because you forgot to select the correct identity in the compose window? Correct Identity can list all your identities (not just the ones for that account), and try to find the one that actually matches the address in the email you are replying to.

Links:

• Addon Page

SyncMab

This extensions can import and export mozilla address books (MAB) when Thunderbird is starting and exiting. You can first save a MAB at a specific location e.g. on a network or the Internet and then let it be updated every time you run Thunderbird. A single MAB can be used by more then one client at the same time then.

Links:

• Addon Page

Contacts Sidebar 0.7.1

Contacts Sidebar displays all available address books in a sidebar the main window and in the compose window. It makes all your contacts easily accessible from the main window to quickly write messages, or to edit the properties of a contact card.

Links:

• Addon Page

Signature Switch 1.6.1

With this you can switch the signature on/off or choose a new one from your predefined set. It can also automatically set different signatures for different recipients. Or you can just use the fortune-cookie feature for a random message.

Links:

• Addon Page