A new version of my favorite mail client Thunderbird has just been released on an Mozilla mirror ftp site and will most likely be available on the website and by automatic updates later this day. If you can’t wait to get your hands on the latest version you could download the latest Thunderbird release for Windows or Linux.

Categories: Email

The Contacts Sidebar extension for the email software Mozilla Thunderbird displays the address book – or books – in the sidebar of Thunderbird beneath the mail folders. A real beauty is that this sidebar can be enabled and disabled with the F4 button which means that you only need to display it when you need the address book. All the possibilities of the address book are given in the sidebar as well, you can edit properties of your contacts or quickly choose a contact that you want to write a mail to. Here are some highlights taken from the description:

Categories: Email, The Web

It happens sometimes that you find duplicate mails in your inbox in Thunderbird. This could happen for instance when you pull new emails from the mail server and get disconnected during that process. It could happen then that those emails will be retrieved again when you check for mails. Thunderbird has a nice hidden variable that defines how it should treat duplicate mails and I’m going to tell you how to set it correctly so that duplicate mails are removed automatically.

Categories: Email, Knowledge

I have added a “send attachment” entry to my right-click context menu when I perform that action on files. Adding attachments to emails was always sort of a burden for me because it was really uncomfortable to open the mail program, click on the attachment button and browse to the file on the hard drive of the computer. A far better way is to right-click the file and select an entry that would automatically open the email program. All that was left to do from this point on was to fill out the email address and write the mail.

Categories: Email, Operating Systems, Windows

Many Internet users do not realize how dangerous Phishing can be. They receive a email which claims to be from their bank and they blindly trust everything that is written in that mail and will click on any links that are displayed in that mail to “update” their security software or passwords. They are usually redirected to sites that password fish their passwords and use them to make online transactions. I’m always astonished by the amount of users that want to do online banking for instance on the Internet but lack basic security knowledge.

Categories: Email, Security

Thunderbird displays only the message count of unread mails of every folder by default. I tried to find a way to display the count of all messages instead which would help me get a better overview of the amount of mails inside a folder. I wanted to make sure that the unread messages number would still be shown as well.

The option to activate the message count for all mails is kinda hidden in Thunderbird. You need to enable the “Show Expanded Columns” option first which can be done by going to Tools > Options, selecting the Advanced tab and checking “Show Expanded Columns in the Folder Pane”.

Categories: Email, Knowledge

I usually do not zip attachments that I send with Thunderbird, it is normally just to much work to zip the files locally and attach them to the mail afterwards. It happens sometimes that I do not zip a php file and send it to someone who gets only garbage because of the way the attachment is processed. I did find an extension for Thunderbird that is perfect for lazy people like me who do not want to go the extra mile just to zip attachments.

Categories: Email, Tools

Look what is appearing on the Mozilla ftp site today: The release candidate 1 of the upcoming mail client Thunderbird 2. Developers claim that it has zero bugs at the moment. That is probably the main reason they announced community test day which is actually today. So, if you want to take part and test the release candidate and provide feedback to the Mozilla developers download it right now from the official Mozilla ftp site. It should be noted that Thunderbird is still only a release candidate and you should take extra precaution before you use it.

Categories: Email

A friend of mine is still using Outlook at home and I was wondering why he did not switch to a more secure email client such as Thunderbird. His response was that Thunderbird was missing a calendar and that this was a feature that he needed. I could not deny that there was no calendar in Thunderbird – until I found the Thunderbird extension Lightning. Lightning which is still in development adds calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks..) to Thunderbird.

Categories: Email