The process is very simply. The Thunderbird add-on will automatically display an option to unsubscribe from support mailing lists in the header of the emails that are send to the accounts that are managed in the desktop email client.

The Thunderbird user needs to click on the unsubscribe link in the header to initiate the process of unsubscribing from the mailing lists. This will display a prompt informing the user that the add-on will open a new email message which, when send by the user, will unsubscribe the email address from the mailing list.

The email usually consists of an email address of the service that send the mailing list email and subject unsubscribe in the email subject with no body text at all. The unsubscribe link is only displayed for mailing lists that use the Inxmail email marketing service which is used by global brands such as Coca Cola. The add-on is compatible with Thunderbird 2 and Thunderbird 3 up to beta 3 which excludes the latest release of Thunderbird 3 beta. The add-on can however be forced to be compatible with the Nightly Tester Tools. A download is available at the Thunderbird website over at Mozilla.

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Mail Merge is an experimental Thunderbird add-on that increases the email client’s mass mailing capabilities. It does so by introducing two new options to the email software: Mass Mail and Personal Mail.

Mass Mail

Mass Mail is ingenious. The user writing the email starts by writing one email that should be send out to all recipients. This includes the title, body and possible attachments. Then all recipients are added to that email in the appropriate fields. A click on the Mass Mail button (available under File > Mass Mail) will now create individual emails for each email recipient and put them in the outbox of the email client. Each recipient will therefor get an individual email message so that no other email addresses appear in the mail header.

Personal Mail

One problem of the Mass Mail approach is that the emails cannot address the individual. Adding Hej Frank to a mass mail would send that greeting to all other recipients as well. That’s where Personal Mail comes into play. Personal Mail makes use of variables and csv files to address individuals in mass mailings. Variables can be added to any field in the email in the form {{Variable}}. It is for instance possible to write an email like the following:

To: {{Mail}}
Subject: {{ID}}: Notification
Body: Hi {{Name}}, this email …

The selection of File > Personal Mail after writing the email will open a dialog with the mandatory option to load a csv file containing the information. The developer does not describe how the csv should look like and I was not able to figure it out on my own. Users who would like to make use of that feature might want to contact the developer directly. The email address is published at the Mozilla Thunderbird page of the add-on. Mail Merge is compatible with both Thunderbird 2 and 3 and can be downloaded from the official Mozilla website.

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Email identities can be created in the account settings of the Thunderbird email client. The account settings can be reached from the top Tools menu. The user then needs to select one of the configured email accounts. A button Manage Identities should appear in the menu that is also displaying various information about the selected email account.

In there it is possible to add or edit email identities. It is for example possible to select a different SMTP server, signature or vcard, change mail folders, use a digital signature and specify a different email address. The email address can be the same but it does not have to be. It is even possible to add a completely unrelated email address for that new identity. You could theoretically configure the identity to send email that looks like its coming from any email account in the world (enter test@example.com for instance and send the mail to one of your accounts to see how it works).

When you write a new message, Thunderbird uses the default identity for the account you are working in. When you reply to a message, Thunderbird uses the identity that matches the address the message was originally sent to, if it can find a match in the account you are working in.

You can select any identity from any of your accounts when replying, forwarding or composing a new message by selecting it in the From drop down list box. If desired, you can also create a unique signature, specify the draft folder, what folder your copy of the sent message should be stored in, and what reply-to address should be used for each identity.

Additional information about email identities in Thunderbird are available a the Mozillazine website.

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There are a number of possible applications that can take care of this task. In this article I am going to illustrate a few of those tools for you so you can choose which one is the right one for you.  So, without further adieu, let’s get on with the installation and usage. NOTE: All of these tools can be found and installed using the new Ubuntu Software Center. For more information on that tool, take a look at my article “The new Ubuntu Software Center“.

Gmail Notifier

Figure 1

The Gmail Notify  is a very innocuous panel applet that also pops up warnings when you have calendar event notifications set up . The setup of this applet is simple. When you first run the Gmail Notifier a windows will appear (see Figure 1) where you enter your Gmail username/password and configure any options you want. But ultimately all this little applet does is reside in your panel and checks your Gmail Account for new email and pops up alerts.

Make sure, during the configuration, you set your Browser path or when select “Go To Inbox” from the right click menu, no action will be taken.

This entry in the Gmail Linux desktop apps is one of the less flashy, but also less intrusive as, say, the Prism take on desktop Gmail.

Check Gmail

This entry in the desktop Gmail space is one of my favorites. One of the main reasons why I like this one so much is that it only takes a simple mouse over on the panel applet to see a full listing of your Gmail inbox. Now, before you even try to start this application up there is a problem. Out of the box the Check Gmail applet will not be able to log into your account. You will go batty trying to make sure you type in your password correctly. The problem is the executable file in /usr/bin. I’m not sure why the developer has not fixed this (the error has been known since 2007), but here’s the fix:

wget http://checkgmail.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/*checkout*/checkgmail/checkgmail
sudo mv checkgmail /usr/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/checkgmail

Figure 2

Once you have done that, Check Gmail will be able to log into your account. Once logged in you will see a tiny red and white applet in your panel that you can right click to get a menu of items to select from (see Figure 2) or you can hover your mouse over to see the first few emails in your inbox and the first couple of upcoming events in your calendar (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

If you do a single left click on the icon your browser window will open for you to log into Gmail. If you right click and select Compose Mail you will also be first taken to the sign in page. Even if you configure Check Gmail to save your password you will still have to sign in to your account before you can read or compose. This is a bit of a frustration and should not be a default behavior. This even happens if you already have a Gmail window open that is authenticated to your account.It would also be nice if you could set the background of the pop up to be transparent so it would be a bit less intrusive, but the application is very usable.

Gmail Prism

What would be a listing of Gmail Apps without including an actual web-based app. I mentioned Prism in my article “Install Prism on Linux for easy to use web apps“. You will find the Prism app listed in Synaptic as Google Mail or Prism for Google Mail. Very little needs to be said about the Prism app other than it’s nothing more than a stripped-down browser window that logs you into your Gmail account. There is no applet to remain out of your way – just a window.

Which is best?

From my experience (and for my preference) Check Gmail gets the vote. Although it has some issues that must be overcome before it will work, once it is working it is the usable of the Gmail applications available. If you rely on Gmail, and check it regularly, you would do well to at least give one of the above a try.

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Most email users should already be familiar with the tips offered at the Gmail blog. Here are the five tips posted at the website:

• Remember to sign out
• Be careful about sending certain sensitive information via email
• Enable “Always use HTTPS.”
• Be wary of unexpected attachments.
• Make sure your account recovery information is up-to-date

Two of the five tips (being suspicious of attachments and careful about sending out information) are valid for all email accounts no matter where they are hosted and whether they are accessed from a website or desktop email software. These programs on the other hand make the tips one and three unnecessary. The email recovery tip on the other hand makes sense for all Gmail users. Gmail offers an option to add another email address to the account which can be used to retrieve Gmail login information or retake an account after it has been hacked by an attacker.

Do you think those tips are sufficient to protect email accounts or would you add other tips to the list?

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Fortunately there is a tool for that. The tool? Spamassassin. Spamassassin is a very versatile SPAM tool that is part of the Apache Foundation. Spamassassin uses numerous means to detect SPAM including: DNS and Checksum based SPAM detection as well as Bayesian filtering, external programs, black lists, and online databases. These tools together make for a fairly powerful detection system.

In this article you are going to see how to install and configure Spamassassin to work in conjunction with Postfix to further enhance your email server.

Installing Spamassassin

Obviously the first thing you need to do is install Spamassassin. You will find Spamassassin in the Ubuntu repositories. And since this entire series has been laid on top of a Ubuntu Server installation, that is quite convenient. So, to install Spamassassin, open up your terminal window and issue the following command:

sudo apt-get install spamassassin

There may or may not be some dependencies to install in order for the Spamassassin  installation to complete. Go ahead and OK those. Once this installation is complete you are ready to start configuring.

Configuration

Before we actually get to the configuration it is important to understand the SPAM scoring system. With Spamassassin, messages are tagged as SPAM only when they have enough SPAM-matching characteristics (according to a scoring level). The scoring level is 0-5, however it’s not as simple as saying a 0 means it is 0% SPAM. The system is set up so that every characteristic can add to the overall score. For example a message tested to find a base64 attachment does not have a file name filtered with both bayes+net will add 0.224 to the over all score of the message. When all of the characteristic scores are added up, if they exceed the default score you have set in the configuration file, that message is considered SPAM.

Now that you have a basic understand of how the scoring system works. Let’s start configuring Spamassassin.

The main configuration file is /etc/spamassassin/local.cf. The first option you want to configure is the default score. Look for the line:

# required_score 5.0

The first thing you want to do is uncomment that line (by removing the “#” character) and then changing the score. A score of 5 is pretty high and sure to be SPAM. Understand the more you lower that score the likely you are of missing message messages that are tagged false-positives. A score of 3.5 is a fairly reliable score that will catch a lot of SPAM but not a lot of false positives.

Above this line are a couple of other options that are important. The first is the option to set the option:

report_safe

To 0. This option can be set to either 0 or 1. A zero means that if a message is found to be SPAM the message will not be deleted, but instead the subject line will be rewritten to include a message marking it as SPAM.  This is handy to prevent users from losing important messages to false positives. This also allows you to set a lower score threshold.

To do this first look for the line:

# report_safe 1

Uncomment this line by removing the “#” character and then change the “1″ to “0″ (no quotes).

The next step is to uncomment the line:

# rewrite_header Subject *****SPAM*****

Now you can alter the “*****SPAM*****” section of this line to reflect what you’d prefer it to say. Just make sure it is clear to your users that a message with this rewritten subject line is most likely SPAM.

Now restart the Spamassassin daemon with the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/spamassassin restart

Configure Postfix

The last step is to set up Postfix to use Spamassassin. To do this open up the file /etc/postfix/master.cf and look for the line:

smtp     inet    n   –   –   –   –   smtpd

You need to alter this line to look like:

smtp      inet   n   -   -   -   -   smtpd -o content_filter=spamassassin

Finally, at the end of this file add the following:

spamassassin
unix - n n - - pipe
flags=R
user=spamd
argv=/usr/bin/spamc
-e /usr/sbin/sendmail
-oi -f ${sender} ${recipient}

Now all you need to do is restart Postfix with the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/postfix restart

Your mail server should now be scoring incoming message as SPAM or HAM.

Final thoughts

The mail server is a tricky beast. You have to ensure that users are getting their mail, but you have to make sure they aren’t receive SPAM or viruses. After completing this series of articles, you should have a pretty solid server running that will send out mail that is safe for users eyes.

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One of the best anti-virus systems for a Postfix server is ClamAV. This anti-virus tool kit is open sourced and can be used on all UNIX-like operating systems. It’s easy to install and effective. In this article we will be following our series started way back in the Installing Ubuntu Server 9.04 article. Of course we will be installing ClamAV on a Ubuntu server running LAMP and Postfix. With that in mind, let’s get busy!

Installation

The first thing to take care of is the installation of ClamAV. There are a number of tools you will need to install. Open up a terminal window and issue the command:

sudo apt-get install clamav clamav-freshclam clamsmtp

The above command should also pick up all of the necessary dependencies. The installation will also start the clamav daemon. You will restart that momentarily

Configuration

Once installed you have some configurations to take care of. There are three files you are going to have to edit:

• /etc/clamsmtpd.conf
• /etc/postfix/main.cf
• /etc/postfix/master.cf

The first file to configure is the clamsmtpd.conf file. The configuration in this file is simple. Look for the lines:

OutAddress: 10025

127.0.0.1:10026

Change them to:

OutAddress: 10026

127.0.0.1:10025

That’s it for the clamsmtpd.conf file. Now let’s move on to the heavier configurations.

Open up the /etc/postfix/main.cf file. Scroll down to the bottom of this file and add the following:

content_filter = scan:127.0.0.1:10025

receive_override_options = no_address_mappings

Save that file and now move on over to the /etc/postfix/master.cf file. Again, scroll down to the bottom of this file and add the following:

# AV scan filter (used by content_filter)
scan unix - - n - 16 smtp
-o smtp_send_xforward_command=yes
# For injecting mail back into postfix from the filter
127.0.0.1:10026 inet n - n - 16 smtpd
-o content_filter=
-o receive_override_options=no_unknown_recipient_checks,no_header_body_checks
-o smtpd_helo_restrictions=
-o smtpd_client_restrictions=
-o smtpd_sender_restrictions=
-o smtpd_recipient_restrictions=permit_mynetworks,reject
-o mynetworks_style=host
-o smtpd_authorized_xforward_hosts=127.0.0.0/8

Save that file.

Restarting

The first thing you need to do is restart Postfix with the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/postfix restart

Once that has restarted you need to restart clamsmtpd with the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/clamsmtpd restart

Now, if nothing has gone horribly wrong, you should have a virus protected Postfix mail server.

Updating signatures

You should never go without updating your virus signatures. This is critical for keeping your mail server virus-free as new viruses are created or old viruses mutate. Fortunately ClamAV has its own tool for this. You will need to go back to that terminal window and issue the command:

sudo freshclam

Which will update the signatures.

You might even add the freshclam command into the root users crontab for regular signature updates.

Final thoughts

Your Postfix mail server is getting better and stronger each day. Adding anti-virus is a critical step in the grand scheme of Postfix things. In our next addition to the Postfix series, we will add Spamassassin for anti-spam measures.

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The Outlook Duplicate Items Remover is a free program for the Windows operating system that can clear – or to be more precise move – duplicate items in Microsoft Outlook. It scans the Outlook contacts, notes, appointments, tasks and emails for duplicate items. This is done by comparing specific variables. For email contacts to be duplicate for example they need to match the first name, last name, company name and email address.

The Outlook software moves all duplicate items into the ODIR_duplicate items folder where they can be processed further. The program works quite well although some Outlook users might find it a bit to limiting as there is no way to change the variables that are compared to find duplicates. Outlook Duplicate Items Remover would for instance fail to find a duplicate contact entry if the name and company matches but not the email.

Outlook users can download Outlook Duplicate Items Remover from the developer’s website.

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Probably the most popular is the configuration of Gmail in a desktop email software program like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. This gets rid of any problems the user might experience in the Gmail web interface and is usually recommended for users who experience Gmail login problems.

Users who want to configure Gmail in a desktop email program can look at the support page at the Gmail website to find instructions for several email clients.

Gmail login problems can also be related to the account, for instance when the user forgot the Gmail password or username. A Gmail help page is available that can aid the user in retrieving this data so that a Gmail login once again is possible with that account.

Users looking for the main Gmail login page can visit this url to log into Gmail right now.

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In this article you are going to learn how to install Postfix on your already running Ubuntu Server 9.04. I am going to assume you have it networked and have a domain registered that you want to use. At the end of this article you should have a working mail server, ready for use.

NOTE: For the purposes of this article, I will use the fake domain “www.ubuntumail.net”. You will want to use your domain in place of that.

The first step is to install the software necessary. Since you already have LAMP up and running all you will need to do is install Postfix and it’s dependencies. To do this open up a terminal and issue the following command:

sudo apt-get install postfix

The installation will not only install Postfix, but will start the Postfix daemon for you. You will most likely want to test this installation by running the old telnet test like so:

telnet localhost 25

You should see something like:
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to www.ubuntumail.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 localhost.localdomain ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)

If you do, success! Now you are ready to take care of the configuration steps.

Configuration

There is only one file you need to deal with in Postfix. That file is /etc/postfix/main.cf. There really isn’t much to configuring this file (for a basic installation – which is all we are dealing with right now).

To set your Postfix installation up for your domain you will want to open that file for editing like so:

sudo nano /etc/postfix/main.cf

The above command opens main.cf in the Nano editor. What you need to look for is this section:

myhostname = ubuntumail
alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases
alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases
myorigin = /etc/mailname
mydestination = ubuntumail.net, ubuntumail, localhost.localdomain, localhost
relayhost =
#mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8
mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8 [::ffff:127.0.0.0]/104 [::1]/128
mailbox_command = procmail -a "$EXTENSION"
mailbox_size_limit = 0
recipient_delimiter = +
inet_interfaces = all

As you can see, I have already configured the above section to work with our sample domain. You will need to go through the above section and insert your domain where you see ubuntumail.net. You will want to pay close attention to the mydestination line. As you can see that line contains:

ubuntumail.net, ubuntumail, localhost.localdomain

This helps to avoid mailloops in Postfix.

Some people also like to use the mydomain parameter, but since mydomain is taken from $myhostname by removing the first part (unless that would cause the domain to be a top-level domain) it can be redundant. If, however, your mail server serves your entire domain, you will need to use the mydomain parameter. For that you would insert:

mydomain = ubuntumail.net

at the top of the section shown above.

Once you have that configuration saved, restart Postfix with the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/postfix reload

To reload the mail server.

Users

As this is a Linux box, you will want to make sure you have a user created for every email address you need to serve up. So create your users with your favorite user creation tool. Since you are most likely installing on a Ubuntu Server (sans GUI), you will be using the useradd command. You can accomplish this with the command:

sudo useradd -m USERNAME

Where USERNAME is the actual username you want to use. Next you will need to give the user a password with the command:

sudo passwd USERNAME

Where USERNAME is the actual username you want to use. You will be prompted to enter the password twice.

After you have entered the users, you can then test the mail server by sending an email from an external source to see if it arrives. If there is a problem make sure the first place you look is /var/log/mail.err.

Final thoughts

At this point you should have a basic, working mail server. Postfix does make this task much more simple than did Sendmail. In my next article I will cover adding Spamassassin to your Postfix mail server to keep SPAM from getting in.

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• Open the Microsoft Outlook temp folder
• Display the size of the folder
• Delete all files in the folder

All of these actions can be initiated after installation of the application on supported Windows operating systems (which are Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 as well as Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2).

The program supports several command line parameters as well which can be used to initiate actions directly. Supported are:

• -clearfolder to delete all files located in the temp folder
• -openfolder to open the folder
• -foldersize to display the size of the Outlook temp folder

These can be used either with a startup shortcut or the Windows Task Scheduler to clean the Microsoft Outlook temp folder regularly without further user interaction.

Outlook Temp Cleaner is compatible with Microsoft Outlook 2010, Outlook 2000, Outlook 2002/XP, Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 to be installed on the computer system. The program can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

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The string sorting option can be very interesting for users of webmail accounts that support Unicode characters like Gmail. The default sorting order in Thunderbird would change the sort order of the Gmail folder as Thunderbird does not use these characters in the sorting process.

The manual folder sorting on the other hand gives the user the versatile option to sort the folders exactly how they should look like without having to care about a specific sort order. It could take longer to sort but in the end it should be the most comfortable for the user.

Manually Sort Folders is available for Thunderbird 3 only. It can be downloaded at the Mozilla Thunderbird website.

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Most email clients contain some sort of SPAM prevention. On the Linux operating system you can employ such tools as Bogofilter or Spamassassin. Either of these tools are great for stopping SPAM – but what about using them with your favorite email client? With some Linux email clients you have to add extra applications in order to have one of these SPAM filters doing their job with your client. Some clients, however, have built-in tools to save you a little work. KMail belongs to the latter category. So long as you have either/or Bogofilter or Spamassassin installed, you are one step closer to having solid SPAM filtering.

In this article you will learn how to set up reliable SPAM filtering in the KMail mail client.

Bogofilter and Spamassassin

KMail can use either Bogofilter or Spammassassin easily. Read up on either tool and decide which application you want to use. I have had good luck with both, but I do believe Bogofilter is easier to set up. And since KMail will automatically detect either, the choice is yours.

You can install either tool from within the Add/Remove Software utility by following these steps:

1. Open Add/Remove Software utility.
2. Search for either “bogofilter” or “spamassassin” (No quotes).
3. Select either (or both) tools for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

That’s it. Now you are ready to move on to KMail.

Kmail SPAM Wizard

Figure 1

When you have KMail set up and running click on the Tools menu and select the “Anti-SPAM Wizard” entry. When the Wizard opens the first thing it will do is detect which SPAM tools you have installed (see Figure 1).

Once the wizard has detected your SPAM tools, select the tool you want to use and click Next. For the purpose of this article I will select Bogofilter.

The next step in the wizard will ask you for two configurations:

• Mark detected SPAM as read: I prefer to unset this, because of the next configuration option.
• Which folder to relocate SPAM: By default KMail will move SPAM to the trash folder. I prefer to create a new SPAM folder in order to catch any false-positives.

By moving SPAM to a specific SPAM folder (and not the trash folder) and keeping SPAM unread, you are less likely to miss any email mistakenly marked as SPAM (false-positive).

The final window of the wizard gives you a report on what you have set up. In my case the wizard creates the following filters:

• Bogofilter Check
• Spam handling
• Classify as Spam
• Classify as NOT Spam

Click the Finish button and your KMail client is ready to learn. And learning is the key.

Help Bogofilter learn

Figure 2

Before Bogofilter can become a reliable SPAM filter, it has to learn what should be classified as SPAM and what should be classified as HAM. Here’s how I like to do it. Allow plenty of email to collect in your inbox. As the mail comes in take all SPAM (that is not already marked and moved) and move it to the SPAM folder. Once you have cleared your Inbox of all SPAM, select all mail in that folder and then click the Ham button (see Figure 2).

Now, once you have collect a good amount of SPAM in your SPAM folder open that folder up, select all the SPAM, and click the SPAM button.

You may have to do this trick a few times before Bogofilter has been properly trained. You will know when Bogofilter has become accurate with your SPAM/HAM.

Final thoughts

It couldn’t be much easier to catch and mark SPAM with KMail and Bogofilter. But if you find Bogofilter not as reliable as you would like, run the Wizard and try Spamassassin instead.

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The only available option to customize the archive is the advanced config editor which makes it possible to change the archiving granularity, names and other settings. The Thunderbird 3 add-on Message Archive Options is basically a frontend for the advanced config options.

There are two options that the add-on offers. The first allows the Thunderbird user to customize the granularity of the archiving function in Thunderbird. It is first and foremost possible to switch from the one folder per year structure to either to a single folder structure or one with months as the additional levels. The date format for the year and year – month structure can be altered as well.

The second option is to add a key modifier to the archiving shortcut. It is possible to add Alt, Shift or Control to [a] to archive the selected email messages.

Message Archive Options does not invent the wheel anew but it offers easier access to customizing the email archive in Thunderbird 3. The add-on is only compatible with Thunderbird 3 and available at the Mozilla website.

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Yahoo Mail accounts are hit by phishing attacks regularly and Yahoo recommends to perform the Yahoo Mail Login only at the official Yahoo website and not at other websites (unless they are also owned by Yahoo).

The official Yahoo Mail login website is https://login.yahoo.com/config/login_verify2?&.src=ym. Another option is to visit the main Yahoo website and open the Yahoo Mail login website from there. The Yahoo Mail login screen should look exactly like the screen above except for the red stars and rectangle around the username and password fields. Those are added by the Last Pass password manager add-on that is available for several web browsers including Firefox and Internet Explorer. Last Pass can automatically fill out the Yahoo Mail login data and perform the login as well. Best of all, it is a very good protection against phishing attempts as the Yahoo user does not need to enter any data in the login form at the Yahoo Mail website.

Yahoo has created a password helper application for Yahoo Mail that can aid users if they cannot login into Yahoo Mail. It can help when users have forgotten their Yahoo Mail username or password.

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The installation is slightly more complicated than the usual add-on installation. The reason for this is Language Tool needs to run as a local server. There is an option to use a remote server but this would mean that the email contents would be transferred back and forth to that server which obviously raises privacy concerns.

The developer of the grammar checking add-on for Thunderbird has published explanations on how to setup the local server and configure the add-on in Thunderbird to use that server. In short: All it takes is to run the server from the web start option provided at the Language Tool website. This will download the files to the local computer system and provide an option to start the tool as a server (File->Option and select “Run as server”:) The server settings need to be changed in the extension’s preferences.

Grammar Checker is an experimental add-on that can be downloaded from the Mozilla website.

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Security analyst Bogdan Calin from Acunetix performed a similar analysis on the leaked Hotmail data. He performed an initial analysis and clean up of the data which consisted of 10,028 entries and started a detailed analysis of the remaining 9843 passwords of which 90% were unique.

• 3,713 = 42 %; lower alpha passwords : passwords containing only characters from ‘a’ to ‘z’. Example : iloveyou
• 291 = 3 %; mixed case alpha passwords : passwords containing characters from ‘a’ to ‘z’ and from ‘A’ to ‘Z’. Example: ILoveYou
• 1707 = 19 %; numeric passwords: passwords containing only numbers (’0′ to ‘9′). Example: 123456
• 2655 = 30 %; mixed alpha and numeric passwords: passwords containing characters from ‘a’-’z’, ‘A’-’Z’ and ‘0′-’9′. Example: Iloveyou12
• 565 = 6 %; mixed alpha + numeric + other characters. Example: 1Love You$%@

The shortest password in the list was made up of one character while the longest used 30 of them. The average length was eight characters with 42% of all users using a password that only consisted of lower case characters from a to z and an additional 19% of all users using a password with numeric values only.The most common used password was 123456 followed by 123456789.

Calin thinks that the passwords have been gathered using various phishing kits. It is also likely that the attack was aimed at the “latino” community which he concluded from the passwords entered by the users. You can find the full report at the Acunetix website.

Verdict: It is interesting that that many users are still using weak passwords for important accounts like web email accounts. But then again, a good password does not help at all if the user enters it in the wrong place for attackers to see.

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Microsoft determined that the attack was not a breach of internal Microsoft data and believes that the account data was gained by a phishing attack. Phishing attacks are common ways these days to lure users into entering their account data on websites that look like the real deal but are not.

Hotmail users are encouraged to immediately change their account password to protect the account from unauthorized access. It is furthermore recommended to change the account password on other websites if the same password was used for accounts there as well.

A good tool that can help users create and use secure passwords is the Last Pass extension which is available for Firefox,Internet Explorer and Google Chrome.

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The situation will likely change with the final release of the email client. It is on the other hand likely that most Thunderbird add-ons will function correctly if their compatibility is edited manually or by using an add-on like the Nightly Tester Tools.

Buttons [link]

The Buttons add-on adds several new buttons to Thunderbird 3 including buttons to display the next or previous email (as opposed to displaying the next or previous unread email which is the default option in Thunderbird), SMTP server selection, delete junk button that marks the message as junk and deletes it afterwards, HTML and Image on and off buttons or a delete thread button that deletes the entire thread of messages.

Hide Menubar [link]

The Thunderbird 3 menu does not usually need to be displayed all of the time. Especially users with lower screen resolutions might be interested to save screen estate to work more comfortable in the email client. Hide Menubar is a straightforward Thunderbird 3 add-on that hides the Thunderbird 3 menubar automatically. The alt key can be used to switch between hiding and displaying the menubar.

gContactSync [link]

This add-on makes it possible to synchronize contacts between the Thunderbird email client and one or multiple Gmail and Google accounts.

Smooth Wheel [link]

Smooth Wheel offers the ability to fine tune the mouse scrolling smoothness in Thunderbird. The default smoothness does not satisfy many Thunderbird users (and actually Firefox users as well) and this is the add-on to customize the smoothness for a better experience.

Remove Duplicate Messages [link]

Duplicate emails are usually experienced during connection errors or if the mail program or mailboxes got damaged. This add-on cleans duplicate emails easily offering to move or delete them in the email program.

FiltaQuilla [link]

FiltaQuilla adds new filters to Thunderbird extending the automatic email processing options in the email client. It is for example possible to launch or run a file, append to subject, train the email program as good or junk and mark the email as unread or replied.

Foxclocks [link]

Can display multiple clocks in the Thunderbird interface.

Know of any other Thunderbird 3 add-ons that should be in this list? Let us know in the comments.

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Most Thunderbird users probably do not need some of the information and options provided by default. This includes for example the information to whom the email was send or the action buttons like deleting emails which are also available on a right-click in the email itself.

That’s where the experimental add-on Compact Headers comes into play. The add-on is compatible with Thunderbird 3 only and can reduce the size of the email header to one row.

Thunderbird 3 Default Email Header:

Thunderbird 3 Compact Email Header:

The way the email header is displayed in compact form can be altered in the add-on’s options. It is possible to increase the size to two rows which can also hold some of the buttons that are provided in the standard Thunderbird header. Buttons can be individually selected in the options.

Compact Header for Mozilla Thunderbird 3 is an experimental add-on that is not automatically updating itself. The add-on comes with a “check for updates” button in the options. It is available at the Mozilla Thunderbird add-on repository at Mozilla.org.

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