The email client Thunderbird displays email conversations on one page. The visual distinction between individual messages is a colored vertical line. Those lines can take up quite a bit of screen estate if lots of emails have been send back and forth. We recently covered the Collapse Quotes add-on for Thunderbird which provided a better overview over those large email conversations.
Another addition to the way conversations are displayed in Thunderbird is the Gmail Conversation View add-on. This add-on ports the way Gmail displays conversations to the Thunderbird email client. Each individual email is drawn with a border so that the computer user can distinguish them on first glance. The colored vertical lines are not needed in this view mode.
Installation of the add-on is unfortunately complicated. This can be attributed to the early experimental stage of the add-on above anything else. Gmail Conversation View requires the installation of either the Compact Header or the Customize Header Toolbar add-on.
Another step that is necessary (after installation of two of the add-ons) is the manual customization of the header toolbar in Thunderbird. This is done by right-clicking the email header and selecting customize. It is now important to drag and drop the button of the add-on – which is called View Full conversation – to the other buttons that are displayed in the email header.
A click on that new button will from now on change the view of that email from the standard Thunderbird view to the Gmail view. Those changes are temporary for now and gone as soon as the user moves away from that email conversation.
The developer has plans to extend the functionality. One interesting option would be to enable the Gmail conversation view mode permanently for all email conversations. Gmail Conversation View is compatible with all Thunderbird 3 versions. The latest version of the add-on can be downloaded from the Mozilla website.
Related Articles:
Thunderbird Conversations, View All Conversation Emails At OnceThunderbird Email Thread Visualizer
Gmail UI For Thunderbird
Synchronize Contacts Between Thunderbird And Gmail
Sync Gmail Contacts with Thunderbird
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If you collapse a conversation and click on it, it also shows in gmail view, so you don’t need the CompactHeader or CustomizeHeader toolbar.
I actually like the original conversation view better, some messages don’t show in gmail convesation view and others show also quoted text.
Both the original and gmail conversation view show only 100 messages, which sucks when people (who think everyone has gmail) use e-mail as chat.
nah
Gmail Conversation View is good. Thanks.
Does it work for Thunderbird 3.0.4? I can’t make it work. I can’t see any difference in my GUI after installing the two add-ons.