In the case of Thunderbird 3.0.3 it is a single bug fix that fixes missing folders and an empty folder pane for some users who have updated to Thunderbird 3.0.2.

Mozilla Messaging recommends the new release to all Thunderbird 3 users even if they have not been affected by the bug.

The new release is already available at the official Mozilla Messaging website. It is provided for all supported operating systems and languages.

The automatic update check of the email client usually picks up new releases quickly as well, expect a notification today in the email client.

Thunderbird 3 users who still want to try out the new release can get it currently only from the Mozilla ftp server to which we no longer link directly out of courtesy for the developers.

A total of 56 bugs have been fixed in the new Thunderbird release including several that caused crashes. At least one security issue was also fixed in the new version of the email client, namely a DNS prefetch security issue. This version also fixes an update for Outlook Express users who want to migrate to Thunderbird 3 as previous versions had troubles importing messages with many recipients or large msg header.

The full list of bug fixes and changes is accessible at the Rumbling Edge. If you want to download and update Thunderbird right now make sure to backup the email client first. (via Caschy)

Update:

The official Mozilla Messaging website has announced the release of Thunderbird 3.0.2. It can be downloaded from there directly for all supported operating systems.

It is therefor important to have the means to display the size of attachments in an email client prior to sending the email to make sure that the email will not be rejected by the mail server due to size limitations.

Displaying email attachment sizes can also be helpful for users who want to reduce the size of their mailbox.

Attachment Sizes is an add-on for the Thunderbird email client that adds size information to all attachments in the web browser. The file sizes are displayed next to each file so that its usually easy to determine the overall size of all attachments. The total size of all attachments is displayed when hovering the mouse cursor over the attachment area in the email client.

This does however only work when sending emails, not when the email has already been received. But the total size is not nearly as important in that case.

Attachment Sizes is compatible with all Thunderbird 3.x clients. It can be downloaded from the Mozilla Thunderbird add-on repository.

It mentions a shutdown hang with high cpu usage and no open imap connections, something that we have been experiencing not regularly but frequently after updating to Thunderbird 3 RC1. The other three fixes have received one major and two normal ratings but they did not affect the email client’s stability or security.

Thunderbird 3 will automatically pick up the new version and suggest a download of it to the user. It is furthermore possible to download the new version of Thunderbird from the developer’s website where it is offered for all supported operating systems and languages. The same page is a good read for users who have not made the switch to Thunderbird 3 yet as it contains a list of the new features of the email program.

The best case for setting up an email account in Thunderbird 3 is that the user only needs to fill out three different parameters of which none are related to mail server host names or ports.

As you can see it is only necessary to fill out a name, email address and password in the beginning.

Thunderbird will now automatically try and discover the incoming and outgoing mail server including ports and security settings. These information are displayed on the same screen and a green light indicates that the discovery was successful.

It is now up to the user to either accept the discovered settings, edit them right away or opt for a manual setup which will lead to the same email setup options that Thunderbird 2 offered its users.

Edit makes it possible to edit parameters like the username, incoming server, incoming mail protocol, port and security settings on the same screen. These can be directly verified by Mozilla Thunderbird 3.

The mail server discovery works very well for popular email providers such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail. It can happen that Thunderbird is not able to discover those settings which often happens if the user hosts mail accounts by lesser known providers or on a virtual or dedicated server.

The only option that is then available is to opt for the manual setup to configure the email account so that it can be used in the email client.

Thunderbird 3 makes it very easy to setup email accounts especially if they are hosted by a popular email provider. These email users do not have to hunt down the mail server settings on the email providers website anymore since they are automatically discovered by Thunderbird.

The following five add-ons have recently been added to the Mozilla Thunderbird extensions repository at the Mozilla website. Some of them are not yet compatible with the latest beta of Thunderbird 3. The email user needs to force compatibility in this case with the Nightly Tester Tools add-on (or edit the compatibility setting in the xpi file manually).

Extra Folder Columns

Thunderbird 2 users were able to display extra columns in the mail folder sidebar. These columns could display the size of each folder on the local hard drive, the total number of emails contained within and the amount of emails that have not been read yet. Not so with Thunderbird 3 which does not provide these additional columns for the folders at all.

Extra Folder Columns has been designed for Thunderbird 3 to add those three columns again to the web browser. All three data columns will be displayed by default but the user has the option to remove them individually so that only the columns are displayed that are of interest to the Thunderbird user.

download Extra Folder Columns

Show In/Out

Show In/Out has been designed for Thunderbird users who like to move email conversations, that is all incoming and outgoing emails, to one folder to have access to all emails of a conversation directly. Thunderbird by default does not show if an email was an incoming or outgoing email. That’s where Show In/Out steps in. It adds two new columns to the main window of Thunderbird. The first displays an icon showcasing if the email was incoming or outgoing, the second displays the name of the sender or recipient depending if the email was incoming or outgoing.

The developer has designed the add-on to replace the sender and recipient columns in the Thunderbird main window helping users who like to move all incoming and outgoing emails into the same folder.

download Show In/Out

ThunderBirthDay

ThunderBirthday will display the birthdays of email contacts in the Lightning calendar add-on. The extension has two dependencies that need to be installed before it can be installed. It first needs the Lighting calendar add-on for Thunderbird and second the MoreFunctionsForAddressBook add-on which adds the fields “birthday”, “birthmonth” and “birthyear” to the email address book.

Create a new calendar in Lightning by clicking File>New>Calendar… in the menu bar. Then choose “On My Computer” as location and “Birthdays from the Thunderbird addressbook” as type for your calendar. Also specify the address book to use as a source for birthdays. Finally choose a name for the new calendar.

Now open the “Edit Card” dialog of an address book card and set the birthday in the “Other data” tab. Note that these changes don’t take effect in the calendar until it gets reloaded. To do this either restart Thunderbird or right click on a calendar from the list, then choose “Reload Remote Calendars”.

Also note that the events generated by ThunderBirthDay cannot be modified with Lightning for the moment. Maybe future versions of the extension will be bidirectional.

download ThunderBirthDay

Forward

Thunderbird by default forwards email messages as attachments. This can be changed in Tools → Options → Composition → General so that the email messages are forwarded as inline messages instead. There is also an option in the Message menu to select either attachment or inline as the method of forwarding the selected emails in Thunderbird. This add-on simply moves this option to more prominent locations: The Forward button and Message context menus.

download Forward

Border Colors

If you have multiple email accounts configured in Thunderbird you might know that there is a chance that you send an email to a recipient from a wrong account. Border Colors is a very simple add-on for Thunderbird that color codes each account that has been configured in the email client. The colors have to be selected after the installation of the add-on as black is being used as the default color for all email accounts.

After configuration a border in the color that has been chosen during configuration will be shown when writing emails. A switch between accounts in the compose email window will also change the border color accordingly.

download Bordercolors

I hope you enjoyed this article. Please write a comment if you would like to have your say on a specific add-on mentioned in this article or would like to add one of your favorite Thunderbird add-ons so that other users can benefit from it as well.

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.

The release notes contain a huge list of new features and improvements including a new email search with advanced filtering options, global search with autocomplete, smart folders, tabbed email messages, new add-ons manager, improved address book, better Gmail integration and integration into Windows Vista’s search results.

Improvements have been made to overall performance and stability as well as web compatibility and sustainability. The way IMAP connections are handled has been improved in this version of Thunderbird as well. Thunderbird can now download IMAP messages by default in the background “to allow for faster message loading and better offline operation”.

Users who are interested in the new version can download it from the Mozilla Thunderbird website. The usual precautions should be taken considering that this version is still a beta version that should not be used in a production environment. The full release notes can be accessed at this link.

Thunderbird Quick Folders aids email users who work with multiple folders in their email client. The add-on will add a new toolbar to the Thunderbird header that can be used to drag and drop folders into it. These folders act as quick access points to the bookmarked folders. It is possible to access these email folders either by left-clicking on them or pressing the keyboard shortcut Alt 1-9 to go there.

The add-on for the email client is highly flexible and offers extended settings to change functionality and design of the add-on.

Options include changing the colors of the email bookmark tabs, displaying the mail count next to each email folder or to automatically focus on the message list when switching to another bookmarks tab. Quick Folders is available at the official Mozilla Thunderbird website. The add-on for the email client is compatible with all versions of the Thunderbird.

Thunderbird users who like to bookmark individual emails might want to take a look at the Bookmark Emails add-on which we reviewed a while ago at Ghacks.

If you open Mozilla Thunderbird in the classic view you are looking at a window that is divided into two areas. The left sidebar contains the email folders while the right window the emails that are contained in the folders and the contents of the selected email.

Thunderbird displays the same icon in the header of the folder and email area to change email display options. The display options can be accessed by left-clicking on the icon which will reveal several display options that can be enabled or disabled with another left-click.

The folder pane offers the three additional display options unread, total and size. Unread will display the unread count of folders, total the total amount of emails in a folder and size the size of that folder on the computer’s hard drive. These options offer several new ways of working with Thunderbird. It is for example possible to see the largest folders or the folders with the highest unread email count on a glance.

The very same display option menu is available in the email list in the right pane. This one contains additional display options that will display the information in additional columns in the same window. This includes sizes, email accounts, recipients, tags and about a dozen more.

These options can again be used to display additional information providing options to display and sort emails by size, recipients or email accounts. The two email display options described in the paragraphs before can for example be used to discover and delete the biggest attachments or emails of a webmail account like Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Live Mail.

The Auto Resize JPEG extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client offers another possibility. The extension will automatically resize pictures that are attached in the email client before they are send out by the user.

The Thunderbird extension will automatically recognize jpg image attachments and display a prompt after clicking on the send button. It is possible to optimize the images or skip the optimization. The options of the add-on contain settings to always optimize images in the email client (which will remove the prompt after clicking on the send button) and to specify a minimum height and width. The default values are set to 1024 pixels each. Options to change the quality level would be nice.

The extension for the Thunderbird email client can be very handy for users who regularly send image attachments in their email messages. It can save them time and bandwidth (and probably a few emails from angry recipients who received large emails). Auto Resize JPEG is available from the Mozilla Thunderbird website. It is currently only available for the Windows operating system.

The email client should pick up the update upon its next startup automatically. Thunderbird users can alternatively use the Help > Check For Updates function in the email client or visit the Mozilla Thunderbird website to obtain the update. The vulnerability, which was disclosed on August 1 is not only affecting the email client but also other Mozilla applications included Mozilla Firefox 3.5 or Firefox 3.0.13.

IOActive security researcher Dan Kaminsky reported a mismatch in the treatment of domain names in SSL certificates between SSL clients and the Certificate Authorities (CA) which issue server certificates. In particular, if a malicious person requested a certificate for a host name with an invalid null character in it most CAs would issue the certificate if the requester owned the domain specified after the null, while most SSL clients (browsers) ignored that part of the name and used the unvalidated part in front of the null. This made it possible for attackers to obtain certificates that would function for any site they wished to target. These certificates could be used to intercept and potentially alter encrypted communication between the client and a server such as sensitive bank account transactions.

Thunderbird by default does not link email conversations in any way. This means that it can sometimes be difficulty to locate all emails of a conversation in the web browser. This is especially true since those emails are usually located in at least two different folders (Sent folder and Email Inbox).

The concept that ThreadVis introduces can be explained with a few words. It processes emails from selected folders (or all emails if the user selects that option) and creates links between emails if they are part of the same conversation.

It then visualizes this conversation in the email header which makes it easy to jump to all emails that are part of it. The emails are color coded in the header. Green dots visualize emails that have been received by the user while red emails are those that have been sent. The time it took for each reply is also shown in the visualisation.

The Thunderbird extension will display a configuration dialog after installation which can be used to define the folders that should be processed and cached by it. It is important to process all relevant folders (e.g. inbox and sent). Some emails are otherwise shown as missing in the visualization.

The visualization can also be displayed in its own separate window which might be useful for some users. ThreadVis is a great Thunderbird add-on for users who want to have better control over email conversations in the email client.

Another interesting new feature is the quick message preview if multiple email messages have been selected. It basically displays about three lines and the subject of each email in the email window which is a very comfortable way of quickly glancing over multiple emails.

The smart folder mode is another new feature which basically combines folders from multiple email accounts. Instead of having to access multiple email inbox folders or sent folders they can now be accessed combined in the smart folder mode. Other notable changes are better Gmail integration for special folders and foreign languages, the ability to notice properly configured mailing lists and offering ways to respond to these emails and column headings which are can now be configured on a per-folder basis.

The changelog lists 592 new features, changes or bug fixes that the developers had made or added to the new release of Thunderbird.

Interested users should keep in mind that the email client is still a beta version. Caution and regular backups are advised. Users who need email for work should make sure that they have a backup in place in case somethings goes wrong.

If you want to do that in the Thunderbird email client you might need to change the way emails are sorted and displayed to be effective. The Gather The Sender add-on for Thunderbird makes this process more comfortable.

Gather The Sender adds a new entry to the right-click context menu in Thunderbird. The new entry can be used to select all email messages in the same email folder from the same sender. It therefor takes two clicks (one right-click on an email and one left-click on the “Select the mails from the same sender” entry) to select all emails from that sender.

This is an excellent way of archiving emails and cleaning the inbox of the email client. Gather The Sender is an add-on for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. It is compatible with all Thunderbird 2.x versions.

All these parameters are handled in the Thunderbird configuration file. To get there click on [Tools] then [Options] to open the visible settings. Now click on the [Advanced] tab and there on the [Config Editor] entry which should open the Thunderbird configuration file which resembles that of the Firefox web browser.

Filter for the term [mailnews.reply] which should display nine entries that define several options when replying to emails in the Thunderbird email client.

Probably the most interesting parameters in these options are:

• mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote – Change the default [%s wrote] to something else. The [%s] variable defines the name of the writer of the original email.
• mailnews.reply_header_ondate – Change the default [On %s] to something else. The [%s] variable defines the date the original email was received.
• mailnews.reply_header_originalmessage – Change the default [-------- Original Message --------] to something else or remove it completely if you feel it is not needed.

You can change a value by double-clicking on its line in the configuration menu of the Thunderbird email client.

The problem is that these indexes can become corrupted over time which causes the slow downs and hangs that some user experience in the email client. The easiest way to fix this problem is to delete the msf files in the Thunderbird profile folder after closing the Thunderbird email client. Thunderbird will automatically rebuild the indexes on its next startup fixing any problems that were caused by these files.

It is of course recommended to backup the Thunderbird profile folder before deleting any files within (Check Backup Email Clients And Web Browsers).

Another possibility is to run a software program like ThunderFix. ThunderFix eliminates most of the hassles associated with the process. It will display a list of Thunderbird profiles that it found on the computer system after execution. All it takes to delete all msf files associated with the profile is to select the profile and click on the Fix Profile link.

It is again recommended to backup the profile before running the software program.

Although the Thunderbird 2.0.0.21 release notes page is already up it has not been fully updated with information regarding this release. It mentions security related fixes in this version of Thunderbird but the link points to a page that has not been updated yet. The download link on the release notes page is also pointing to Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 and not the current release.

Many users would probably want to update their email client immediately after reading that it contains patches for security issues. Several users reminded us last time we posted a link to a release of Firefox and Thunderbird that we should not do so. So, no link for now which is kinda stupid as everyone with half a brain will be able to find the Mozilla ftp site with the download link of Thunderbird 2.0.0.21.

Everyone else will have to sit tight with an insecure version of Thunderbird until the official distribution process has been completed and the update is officially announced.

Some add-ons might stop working after installing Thunderbird 2.0.0.21. You could try and change the allowed version number manually or wait for the software developer to update the add-on for the email client.

Messages can be archived pressing the A key highlighted or by using the archive button that appears in the header area of each message. They will be automatically sorted into the correct year and month folder in the mail structure. That’s very handy for users who receive lots of messages per day that they have to keep.

Another change is a central activity manager that lists the most recent changes in the email client, e.g. retrieving or moving mail. That’s not a lot of new features but Thunderbird was already a very solid mail client. Especially the archiving feature can save lots of time for some users. Thunderbird 3 beta 2 is available for all supported operating systems and languages.

The Thunderbird extension adds ten keyboard shortcuts to the Thunderbird email client which can be used to archive email messages. The functions are mapped to [CTRL 0..9] which proves to be difficulty as Thunderbird uses [CTRL 1] and [CTRL 2] for different functions making those two keyboard shortcuts not working initially.

The user can basically map a folder of his mailbox to one of the keyboard shortcuts. This essentially means that any selected mail would be moved to that folder upon pressing the keyboard shortcut. The shortcut [CTRL 0] has been reserved to work with mail filters which can also be defined in the extension. Pressing that shortcut while working in Thunderbird will apply all configured filters to the selected messages.

This proves to be a very effective method of moving mails quickly to designated folders in Thunderbird. It is possible to correct the non-working [CTRL 1] and [CTRL 2] keys by installing the excellent Keyconfig add-on for Thunderbird. Keyconfig will display all keyboard shortcuts in the email client and provide the means to change them. It can be used to either change the keyboard shortcuts of the extension or to change the original keyboard shortcuts to something else so that all keys can be used when working with the extension.