One of the limitations of Thunderbird is that there are no hotkeys to quickly switch folders or save mail into another folder. The user has to use the mouse to save or copy mails into folders and use it as well if he wants to switch folders. Well there actually is a way to switch folders with the keyboard only which involves ALT Tab but it’s more of a nuisance than a useful feature.

Enter Nostalgy for Thunderbird. The extension for Thunderbird adds much needed hotkey support for several actions that are performed regularly. The major three are switching to another folder, saving mail into a folder and to copy mail into a folder.

The shortcuts are (g) for switching folders, (s) for saving mails and (c) for copying mails. Pressing a button opens a folder browser and a text input field in the status bar of Thunderbird. The user can enter part of the folder’s name to filter the results and use the up and down arrow keys to pick it. Pressing Shift in combination with one of the hotkeys will go to, save or copy the selected mails into the folder that has been previously used.

continue reading "Thunderbird Folder Hotkeys"

I recently spotted two new folders in Thunderbird which I definitely did not create. The names of the folders where nstmp and nstmp-1 and they did contain mails from the main email inbox folder. That was strange on first sight because it was not obvious why those folders were created in first place.It turned out that Thunderbird had created the two folders during folder compacting.

Thunderbird is creating the nstmp folders when it is compacting folders. When Thunderbird is interrupted during folder compacting it will not delete the nstmp folders that contain the temporary emails of the process up to the point where the compacting process was stopped. Compacting will stop when Thunderbird is (accidentaly or due to a crash) closed during compacting or when a new email arrives during that operation.

Those nstmp folders can normally be deleted but a user should check the original folder to make sure that it still contains all the mails that are listed in the nstmp folder. If that is the case the folder can be easily deleted by right-clicking it and selecting delete from the context menu.

continue reading "Nstmp Folders In Thunderbird"

Just like Firefox Thunderbird can be customized with themes that give the email client a fresh look. Themes are installed just like add-ons in Thunderbird by opening the Tools > Add-Ons menu in the Thunderbird top menu and switching to the Themes tab on top. The install button is located on the lower left of that window. A file browser window opens that filters .jar files, the theme format Thunderbird themes come in.

The email client has to be closed and opened again before the new theme becomes visible. It also has to be activated from the themes tab in the add-ons menu before it becomes visible. The easiest way to accomplish the whole process is to install the theme, switch to the theme tab, activate the new theme and restart the browser then.

Many of the themes for Thunderbird at the official Mozilla Thunderbird website do not work with the latest version of Thunderbird which is surprising to say the least. It is probably possible to force compatibility but that has not been tested. All themes listed in this article are working with the latest version of Thunderbird which is currently 2.0.16. They probably will also work with Thunderbird 3.

continue reading "Eight Beautiful Mozilla Thunderbird Themes"

Do not publish your email on the Internet. That’s is one of the first lessons to learn when you start using the Internet. Once your email has been cached by a search engine it will sooner or later be discovered by bots that crawl the Internet for this valuable information.

All kinds of protection have been created to prevent this from happening. Some suggest using images instead of text, many obscure their emails in the hope that the bots will not be able to identify the right one and others are not publishing their mail at all.

Tinymail steps in and tries to be a barrier between your email address and the Internet. It does that by linking your email address to a Tinymail webpage which becomes your profile page. Instead of publishing your email on the web you embed the Tinymail code that is created after linking the email to a Tinymail email address.

continue reading "Tinymail Email Protection"

I covered the email provider Akapost about ten days ago and liked what it had to offer. It was not your usual Gmail / Yahoo Mail kind of provider but one that would put an end to email spam to your mail inbox. This was achieved by acting as a proxy between the user’s email account and the destinations.

The user would create an Akapost email account at their website and link it to one of his real email accounts. Whenever he wanted to signup on a site he would use the Akapost email account which would forward all incoming mails to his account.

Mails that he wanted to send could be send to Akapost first which would forward them to the email recipient. This effectively means that no sender or website is able to uncover the real email address of the user. Akapost featured a few additional options, just read my initial article if you are curious.

continue reading "Five Free Akapost Plus Upgrades For Grabs"