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Thunderbird: Unsubscribe Mailing Lists

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:34:31 +0000

Thunderbird day today? Not sure about that but today is the day where two interesting new add-ons have been posted at the Thunderbird website. The first was the add-on that increased the mass mailing functionality in the web browser. The Unsubscribe From Mailing Lists add-on does exactly that. It provides an option to unsubscribe from mailing lists from withing the email client. A feature similar to the one that Gmail is offering to its users for some time now.

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.

Read mailing lists with clogging up your inbox

Joe — Sat, 23 May 2009 22:20:22 +0000

Mailing lists still hold an important role in many free software projects and are a place where development is co-ordinated and support provided.

When you subscribe to a mailing list, you generally have the option of receiving every individual message or receiving a daily digest. However, if you need to read a few, this can still clog up your inbox.

Whilst you could read web-based archives, my favourite option is reading them though Gmane – an NNTP/mailing list gateway.

Gmane allows you to read newsgroups through a USENET newsreader (basic newsgroup facility is built into software like Thunderbird . I find this a more manageable way to read mailing lists, because the client threads them for me.

Gmane works both ways: it allows you to post to newsgroups through USENET too. All it does is the first time you try to post to a mailing list, it sends you a verification email to confirm it is indeed you.

Gmane also allows you to read newsgroups through RSS, so you could use a feed reader (online or desktop)!

There are currently over 10,000 mailing lists accessible through Gmane, ranging from the Wikipedia mailing lists to a blackjack group! To find groups, browse their website or browse their newsserver.

Thunderbird Email Address Crawler

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 13:47:29 +0000

The email client Mozilla Thunderbird comes with the option to import address books from various other email clients like Microsoft Outlook, Eudora or text files. There is however no automatic way to import contact information from a set of emails. Why might that be useful? Imagine having to communicate with a group of users. You could import their contact information into a new address book from emails that you have previously received.

The Email Address Crawler add-on for Thunderbird does that. You can point it at any mail folder in Thunderbird and import the contact information into any address book automatically. The add-on comes with a few filters to make the automatic import more reliable. It is possible to specify if mails should be imported from the To, From or CC fields and if there should be a minimum amount of emails from a person before they are imported.

The add-on will automatically select the most complete email if different versions are available meaning that it will prefer Full Name email@address.org over email@address.org

The add-on provides an excellent way of creating new mailing lists by importing contact information automatically into address books.