CLibra’s Blog

Although there are claims that email is dying (or more specifically, desktop email clients), Thunderbird still remains the best free and open source alternative to proprietary email clients such as Outlook; just like its cousin Firefox, Thunderbird can be extended, tweaked, and re-used in unorthodox ways to power it up, and so it’s possible to turn Thunderbird into the ultimate Outlook replacement, or make it integrate smartly with Google’s services.

A calendar is a must have for any email client, and at the moment Thunderbird doesn’t come with out out of the box. However, the Lightening project embeds a fully-featured calendar into Thunderbird, which supports CalDAV so you can synchronise Google Calendar easily; by doing this, you’ll also benefit from Thunderbird picking up event invitations sent to that GMail address. Extending the calendar further are extensions such as vcs Support, which allow you to import & export vCalendar files, multiple timezones can be managed by using FoxClocks, and tasks from Remember The Milk can be managed from within Thunderbird with the Provider extension.

A simple way to keep your contact list in the main view is the Contacts Sidebar, and you can access your Google Contacts in Thunderbird by using Zindus to keep them in sync. In fact, by using Zindus on multiple machines, you’re able to effectively keep your contacts synchronised and still access them online through Gmail.

Several annoyances can be fixed in Thunderbird easily, making it more powerful. For example, MailTweak will allow you to change so many advanced options in Thunderbird – I found it useful as it removed those pesky ‘Local Folders’ which were unused because I used IMAP. Speaking of IMAP, I recently posted about a fix I came up with to correct Thunderbird’s behaviour in the way it handled the GMail spam folder, as beforehand messages in spam were treated as new mail. Also, you can get a reminder when you forget to attach a file to an email, which I’m sure we could all benefit from, and you can remove that message sending dialog box. Finally, this extension will let you chose between inline or attached forwarding easily.

Outlook features a note-taking app and an RSS reader, and while Thunderbird has the latter, the trend is to opt for an online feed reader; using Thunderbrowse, you can embed Google Reader straight into Thunderbird so you can continue to read your updates in any browser. And the notes app? A while ago I came up with an unorthodox way of using GMail’s filters and Thunderbird’s templates to make a note-taking system tied to my email.

To send IM messages on a range of networks, or to simply use Twitter from within Thunderbird, have a look at the SamePlace extension which adds more messaging features to the client. It’s also possible to get a lightweight weather forecast from anywhere in the world in your sidebar with World Weather+; although weather extensions are stereotypically bloated and annoying, this one’s made really well.

If you’re an IMAP user and want more information & control over your messages, take a look at these two extensions: Display Quota does exactly what it says on the tin as it shows a progress bar of how much space you have in your email account, and GMailUI adds several features from GMail such as keyboard navigation, archiving and expression searching.

GMail supports IMAP IDLE in Thunderbird, so email is pushed to me as soon as it arrives. For greater control over sending & recieving of email, MagicSLR provides lots of options including a combined Get/Send button similar to Outlook. You can delay the sending of email until whenever you like by using Send Later, and you can ‘bounce’ a message to the correct recipient whilst keeping headers intact with mailredirect.

Finally, these two extensions will allow you to add extra information to your emails; you can timestamp your messages with the current date and time, and XSMTP can insert additional headers into an email to denote urgency, confidentiality and other things.

I’ve tried to compile a list of the best power tools for Thunderbird to make it suitable to replace Outlook (and GMail’s web interface to an extent), but if you have any other tips or extensions that are worth a mention, please let me know!