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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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The experimental Mozilla Thunderbird 3 add-on FiltaQuilla adds those additional actions to the Thunderbird Filter settings, in particular filters to launch a software program, append text to subjects, remove tags or stars, mark the email as replied or unread, copy the mail as read or disable notifications.

Probably the most interesting filter of this list is the filter to launch a file after receiving an email message that meets the requirements.

Each Thunderbird filter can be activated and deactivated in the options of the Thunderbird add-on. The mail filters can be selected in the Tools > Message Filters menu.

The Thunderbird add-on is unfortunately only compatible with Thunderbird 3 and not with the more widely used Thunderbird 2. Thunderbird 3 is currently available in Beta 1.

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The beta release of the email client contains some of those new features already. Some of them are the long awaited improvements to IMAP for faster message viewing, improved email import from other email clients or the tab interface for emails.

The beta will install into a different directory in Windows and MAC OS X while the developers say that it may overwrite settings in Linux. They still recommend to backup the profile before installation to be on the safe side.

The release notes list several issues that are known in this release that might affect your system. You should check them out before installation to avoid complications.

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There is no word yet on what we can expect from this release, since it is a alpha release I would not advise to make the change immediately from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3. Word is that not all plugins and add-ons are working in Thunderbird 3. If you cannot wait to make the switch make sure you backup all your data before doing so.

I will wait until a final version of Thunderbird 3 has been posted or a portable version of it. I do not want to risk losing all my mails even if I have a backup.

One of the official sites states the following:

In order to elicit feedback on new feature ideas, and get early and frequent feedback from the tester community, we will be releasing several alpha and beta releases of Thunderbird.

These releases are not for production use, but for developers and testers to give us early feedback. To emphasize this point, these alpha releases are called Shredder — they do not represent the final state of any Thunderbird release, can contain significant bugs, and should be handled with appropriate care

A link to the release notes was posted on the same page:

Shredder Alpha 1 is built on top of the Gecko 1.9 platform, which has been under development for the past 33 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 10,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability.

The main goals of this release is to find out about possible problems caused by the changes in the underlying platform. While much has changed in the underlying code, there are few new features in this release. Notable changes include:

• The new Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can now be used to download and install a Thunderbird customization from the hundreds of Add-ons available from our community add-ons website. When you first open the Add-ons Manager, a list of recommended Add-ons is shown. Note that few add-ons are compatible with this early alpha at the time of release, as add-on developers need to upgrade them.)
• The address book can now read data from Mac OS X’s system Address Book, but that feature is currently disabled by default. To enable it, see this blog entry
• New Crash Reporter (Breakpad) to report crashes in Thunderbird.
• Searching bodies of messages no longer produces as many false positives and has become more accurate in some multilingual situations.
• Improvements to our JavaScript engine have resulted in continued improvements in performance.
• On the Mac, Thunderbird is now a native Cocoa application.
• There is a version of the DOM Inspector that works for Shredder Alpha 1, available from Mozilla Add-ons.
• There is a version of the Venkman debugger that works for Shredder Alpha 1.

The Rumbling Edge reports 850 changes in Thunderbird 3.0 alpha 1.

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The main reasons why Thunderbird has not been chosen by many users -in comparison to Gmail or Microsoft Outlook – are the missing calendering function which makes Microsoft Outlook so indispensable and a mediocre search function which can’t compete with that of Gmail for instance. The main emphasize will therefor be to add those two features to Thunderbird.

A integrated calendering function is in my opinion a solid step in the right direction because this really seems to be a function that most users would not want to miss. And installing an extension to add support for it as it is currently the case is not that helpful either because most average users don’t even know that such a feature exists.

Besides these two functions the codebase will be revised quite a bit and patches plus bugfixes will also be released frequently. I’m looking forward to test the new releases of Thunderbird 3 once they come out, what about you ?

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