Mozilla Thunderbird is still the most popular eMail client on the Internet; mostly because of the plug-ins you can use with it to build and customize the application to specifically how you want it to function.
I’ve compiled a list of plug-ins for Thunderbird that makes it a very productive eMail client. With plug-ins like Lightning, Google Contacts, SocialMail and a Mail Merge, you can make Thunderbird a communications hub for everything you need to do.
Again, this list is based on someone who wants to be ‘productive’ with Thunderbird; with more focus on being professional, organized and connected.
Top Plug-ins
Lightning [calendar]
Upgrade Thunderbird to a full Personal Information Manager with Lightning. It allows you to manage your daily schedule (events and tasks) directly within Thunderbird.
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Lightning [calendar] |
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Provider for Google Calendar
This extension allows Sunbird and Lightning to read and write events to a Google Calendar.
There’s also one for Microsoft Exchange:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/195279/
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Provider for Google Calendar |
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Thunderbird Conversations
This add-on provides a conversation view for Thunderbird, including contacts tooltips, attachment thumbnails, quick (inline) reply, contacts tooltip, integration with other add-ons, and much more.
Thunderbird Conversations is a Thunderbird extension which, as the name implies, enables a conversation view in your Thunderbird. Notable features include:
- a regular conversation view that fetches messages from all folders, and behaves just like Gmail’s
- integration with Thunderbird Contacts: participants have tooltips in the conversation, and you can view their avatars and profiles from Facebook, Twitter…
- a quick reply feature, with autocomplete, that allows you to reply to a thread in a snap,
- quoted parts are collapsed,
- keyboard shortcuts,
- and a few other bonus features.
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Thunderbird Conversations |
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Mailbox Alert
Mailbox Alert allows you to specify, for each separate mail folder, a message, sound and/or a system command that will be executed when new mail is found there.
This way, you specify different actions for less important folders, or no action at all.
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Mailbox Alert |
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SocialMail
SocialMail aims to simplify email management and bring social network functionality into the email experience.
SocialMail brings the following features into the email experience
Look up your contact in the social networks (Facebook, etc) and show which networks they are on.
Display a profile profile picture, from a social network or gravatar (falling back to wAvatar/Identicon/monsterID if nothing is available).
Track who knows who, through your conversations
Makes it easy to find attachments, urls and phone numbers that someone has sent you
See tweets from your contacts emails and post twitter updates direct from Thunderbird
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SocialMail |
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Send Later
True “Send Later” functionality to schedule the time for sending an email.
Changes the “Send Later” command (Ctrl+Shift+Return) in the message composition window, so that instead of merely copying the message into your Outbox so that it is sent the next time you go online or do “Send Unsent Messages”, a dialog pops up which allows you to specify when the message will be sent.
You can specify a specific time and date, or click “15 mins later”, “30 mins later” or “2 hours later”, or click “Passthrough to Send Later” to get the built-in Thunderbird “Send Later” functionality (i.e., copy to Outbox).
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Send Later |
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Auto Re-size Image
Auto Resize Image is a Thunderbird add-on which allows to resize attachment images when sending an email.
The main purpose is to:
- reduce size of image files (emails > 5 Mb are generally blocked by ISPs).
- give the image convenient dimensions for it to be visible directly in email client without using scrollbars.
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Auto Re-size Image |
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Grammar Checker
The extension is intended for checking grammar using LanguageTool (http://www.languagetool.org/) facilities (in particular, the extension uses its webserver). Though it can work without any further customization, it is strongly recommended to setup local LT server (see http://nuald.blogspot.com/2009/10/thunderbird-grammar-checker-extension.html), and change the extension settings to correspond with your server. By default, the extension uses the small-scale server, which can’t handle enormous load (and of course, it is not so suitable from privacy point of view).
Supported languages: English (en), Dutch (nl), French (fr), German (de), Icelandic (is), Italian (it), Lithuanian (lt), Polish (pl), Romanian (ro), Russian (ru), Slovak (sk), Slovenian (sl), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv), Ukrainian (uk).
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Grammar Checker |
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Mail Merge
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Mail Merge |
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Google Contacts
Access bi-directionally to Google contacts via address books. This extension detects gmail accounts which have already set up and creates address books for each of them. Cards in the address books are synchronized with Google contacts; they represent the current Google contacts contents and Google contacts will be modified when you modify the cards.
TB’s mailing lists and Google’s contacts groups are synchronized in the same manner.
For more information see http://hogiblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/synchronizing-google-contacts-and.html
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Google Contacts |
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Bonus Item
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Using Thunderbird, Quicktext is the perfect tool to help you quickly answer routine, repetitive emails. Quicktext performs both simple and complex tasks. The program can insert different signatures into your emails depending on whom you are sending the email to.
Quicktext now exists as two versions: Quicktext and Quicktext Pro. The Pro version have even more features and can be found on the extensions homepage.
Even better, you can use variables like [[TO=firstname]] to personalize your emails. You can also specify an emails subject and which attachments to add when creating a template for your email.
There are many easy ways to insert a template: by toolbar; by adding a button to the main-toolbar; you can right-click and choose a template; you can set up shortcuts like Alt+1 to insert a specific template; and most useful of all, the keyword feature. Just add a keyword to a template and then write that word in the email and press TAB—the keyword is then replaced by the template.
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Quicktext [canned responses] |
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