By now, everyone should know about Thunderbird; it’s a free email client from the Mozilla Foundation. The program itself is very extensible. By default the e-mail application is pretty much just a basic e-mail client, but by adding extensions to the application you can make it do or perform to your preference.
One of the things that makes Thunderbird so popular is the ability to add extensions. extensions add all kinds of functionality to Thunderbird, such as a calendar, tasks, reminders and lots of other things that make it extremely useful.
This article will cover just a few things that will enhance your experience with Thunderbird as well as manage your e-mail accounts.
Here’s 6 that I think should be standard with Thunderbird…
Thunderbird Extensions:
- Display mail user agent
this displays the e-mail client from which the e-mail that you received was written. Such as Outlook, Outlook express, Thunderbird and many others.
- Google contacts
Google contacts is an extension that allows you to synchronize your contacts with Thunderbird. This enables you to have your contacts in two different places.
- Lightning
lightning is a calendar interface for Thunderbird. It works in conjunction with provider for Google calendar OR Sunbird [Mozilla]. This adds the functionality of a calendar, tasks and reminders.
- Message faces
Message faces uses the Gravatar service to try to identify the person that sent you the e-mail and then show a picture of the individual in the heading of the e-mail; it makes the activity of reading e-mail a little more personal.
- Provider for Google calendar
this extension allows you to connect directly with Google and your Google calendar. The activities on your Google calendar are synchronized to your local Thunderbird calendar or vice versa. If an appointment is placed on your calendar and convert it carried over to your Google calendar so you can have your information anywhere you want to go.
- Webmail
Webmail is an extension that allows you to connect to Web e-mail portals such as Yahoo, Hotmail, MailDotCom, Gmail, Libero, and AOL. without this extension access to these e-mail portals through a typical e-mail client would not be possible.
Thunderbird Image Tweak:
I send a lot of instructional e-mails to family friends and to other users and being able to copy and paste images or screenshots directly into e-mails is very important for the composition of the e-mails; to know that the images and pasting are actually there and are going to be received by the recipient.
By default Thunderbird blocks some images from being pasted into an e-mail and the result is simply a placeholder with a red X. in a box.
The following information will correct that problem:
Thunderbird has code used to prevent downloading content from untrusted locations. One example is if you view message from mailbox, Thunderbird will not download any images from remote (http) URL. This code affect new message editing.
But there is another catch: if you start writing new message using “Write” button, it gets internal security id 0, and all security checks are skipped, but for mailto: messages, they are internally checked as new, but mailto (nsIMsgCompType::MailToUrl), and security is taken into account.
Now, another funny thing: new message have url “about:blank”, new image from file (clipboard image is a temp file) have url “file:…” => protocols does not match and security prevents displaying image. But recipient will get and see them.
To override this, you may use “about:config” to add new ‘boolean’ preference *network.protocol-handler.expose.file*, with value *true*. This will make TB to trust “file:” protocol.
Thunderbird Email Filters/Rules
One of the most important things that you can do with any e-mail client is to organize the information that’s being sent to you.
You should consider your e-mail inbox like a file and folder/cabinet. Information needs to be organized or if you find it in an efficient way.
Failure to do this will cause you problems with finding or losing information all together. So, it’s important to categorize your information into folders that can be recognized and searched quickly. Try not to create too many folders inside your inbox; you don’t have to over organize.
Thunderbird as a very simplistic e-mail filter system.
you start by selecting your e-mail account that you want to apply a filter to and then you choose the option to create a NEW filter.
Using the options choose how to filter out your incoming emails.
Now when emails come in from various places they can be filtered to Family, Friends, Junk, forums and so on.
Here’s a youtube video on how to create a filter.
Hope this helps.
This is a living document so expect it to get updated later.
Thanks for reading!
Enjoy.
Larry Henry How to, Software add-on, AOL, Gmail, Google, Hotmail, http, leak, Mozilla Foundation, Plug-in, torrent, Ubuntu, Web e-mail portals, Yahoo
Microsoft established it’s self as the conqueror years ago, but it wasn’t because Internet Explorer was better; it’s because it was free. AND Microsoft was pushing the updates out thru the automatic updates.
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