Thunderbird Birthday Reminder

Martin Brinkmann
Feb 8, 2007
Updated • Mar 15, 2014
Email, Thunderbird
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Birthday Reminder is a sweet little add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird which does exactly what the name implies: it reminds you of upcoming birthdays of contacts that are in your address book in Thunderbird. It is relatively easy to add new birthdays to the address book so that they do get picked up automatically as well when the birthday nears.

Recent versions of the extension can sync information with the Lightning extension of with Google Calendar.

Birthdays can be added to the Thunderbird address book directly in the following way:  click Tools > Address Book or use the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-B to launch it. Right-click on the contact that you want to edit here and select properties from the context menu that opens up.

Switch to the other tab here and enter the birthday in the custom field 1 on the page.If that is already reserved for someting else, us another custom field and change which field to use in the configuration of the extension. You need to add the birthday in the format day.month.year (e.g. 8.2.1994).

The new birthday will be picked up automatically by the birthday reminder extension. Two notification options exist: The first reminds you using emails that it sends to you. You can configure how many days in advance you want it to notify you about the upcoming birthday.

The second reminder is a simple popup window which opens every time Thunderbird is opened. I do not like the second option that much because I tend to open and close Thunderbird a lot and it soon becomes annoying to close the birthday reminder popup.

The extension is really useful if Thunderbird is your main messaging client, and if you maintain an address book in the email client.

There are other means to getting birthday reminders, and many email client, both desktop or online, offer options to enter and work with birthdays. Thunderbird users who have the Lightning calendar extension installed, will notice that birthdays will get automatically synchronized with the calendar app for that extra bit of convenience. One of the latest versions of the extension can also sync data with Google Calendar.

Verdict

If you are using Thunderbird and want a quick way of keeping track of birthdays of people that you are communicating with, then this is your best option to do so. And since you can sync the data with Lightning or Google Calendar, you do get access to it in other programs or services as well (for instance your Android phone).

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Comments

  1. A.v.Essen said on August 4, 2020 at 2:25 am
    Reply

    Seems to be completely outdated. Works only up to Thunderbird 13.xx – we have reached 68.11 at the time of this writing.
    So simply forget it!!!

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