Thunderbird 2 came out last week, and it's been more useful to me than ever. I currently have 4 e-mail accounts, and I use Thunderbird to manage all the mail, plus a few RSS feeds that i don't have time to read on a daily basis.
Just a quick rundown of the extensions I've found to be the most helpful in my day to day e-mailing and such.
- Thunderbird Tray (TB-Tray) -- My favorite Thunderbird extension isn't really even an extension. TB-Tray sits in your system tray and allows Thunderbird to minimize there (so it doesn't take up space in your taskbar). For someone like me who has Thunderbird running ALL the time, this is essential. Another true extension called MinimizeToTray adds this functionality as well, but I found it to be a bit buggy when I last used it. Plus, TB-Tray allows you to instantly write an e-mail or call up your address book directly from the system tray.
- Nostalgy--Nostalgy lets you quickly navigate your folders and move messages within Thunderbird simply by using your keyboard. I'm a bit of a pack rat and have a lot of archived e-mail. Nostalgy makes saving messages a very natural ~4 keystroke process, and finding them again is just as simple.
- Lightning--Mozilla's calendar extension for Thunderbird. It's improved a lot since they started development on it, but in Thunderbird 2 I've finally started using it full-time because of....
- Provider for Google Calendar--This extension allows for 2 directional gCal access through the Lightning extension. Fantastic! When I'm on anyone's computer, I can access my calendar through the online interface, and when I get back to Thunderbird/Lightning I have full access to my up to date calendar. (This extension requires Thunderbird 2 -- won't work with 1.5) You can find instructions on how to get the two in sync here.
- Buttons! -- This extension adds new buttons you can add to your Thunderbird toolbars. I don't need most of the functionality it offers except for one button: "Select SMTP!" With a click of this button you can quickly change the default SMTP server that Thunderbird uses for outgoing messages. This is great if you run multiple e-mail accounts through Thunderbird; you can instantly change the e-mail address you're using to send a particular e-mail.
- Send Later -- Sometimes I need to send an e-mail to someone-- just not right now. Or, I want to send myself a reminder e-mail tomorrow so that I remember to do something. The Send Later extension makes things so that a ctrl+shift+enter invokes a dialog box where you can choose the date and time for the message to be sent.
3 comments:
You might also want to try the New Mail Alert Config for Thunderbird 2.0 if you have got multiple accounts.
How inconsiderate of me, here is the link:
http://unsignedbyte.com/nmalertconfig.html
@ karthik
Looks like a very convenient little extension--I only need alerts for 2 of my accounts, so this is fantastic! It should really be included by default in Thunderbird. Thanks for the tip!
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