The ten most useful thunderbird add-ons

I’ve written a great deal about firefox and tons of extensions that have been developed for it but I’ve never done the same for thunderbird, the email client that is based on mozilla. I started using thunderbird about a week ago and imported all my emails from opera to it and I love this tool. It is fast, I can sort everything the way I like it and the spam mail recognition is awesome even without third party tools.

The list of extensions disappointed me a little bit, 297 add-ons is not much considering that firefox has 1863 add-ons listed. I nevertheless compiled a list of the ten most useful thunderbird add-ons according to my opinion, yours may and probably will differ on the subject.

1. Minimize to Tray - You can’t minimize thunderbird to tray, you can only minimize it to the taskbar or close it completely. You could alternatively use a third party tool like RBtray instead.
2. United States English Dictionary - A great spellchecking dictionary.
3. Lightning - Thunderbird has no calendar and lightning adds calendar functionality. Currently under developement.
4. Dod Configuration - Departement of Defense Configuration. Configures your application for use within the Department of Defense.
5. Addressbooks Synchronizer - Synchronise files if you use Thunderbird on different computers, like notebook and desktop or home and work.
6. Clippings - Have some standard sentences that you use a lot in mails ? Use Clippings to save them and paste them easily whenever you need them.
7. Maximize message pane - maximizes the message preview pane without opening a new window.
8. Text size toolbar - Adds buttons to the toolbar to change the size of the text.
9. ReminderFox - works as well in thunderbird, reminds you of events to come.
10. Quicktext - create templates for emails that you write over and over again.

Five more, good ones but specialised:

• Track Package - You ship or receive lots of packages each day ? Ebay junkie perhaps ? This extension is for you, mark a tracking number and check where the package is.
• Okopipi - Report spam to central databases.
• abc Tajpu - write foreign characters with this extension. Surely looks bad to write something like smoerebroed the way I do.. smørebrød it is i think..
• Signature Switch - one for work, one for home, one for friends, one for p…
• Nested Quote Remover - Remove nested quotes before it becomes ugly.

Two not so serious ones:

• Quitomozilla - Helps you stop smoking by displayed the time you stoped, the cigaretes that you did not smoke in that time and the amount of money that you saved, works in thunderbird and firefox for maximum results.
• Bork Bork Bork - The Swedish chef would speak the text this way.. Smoerebroed all the way..