Best Thunderbird Addons to Improve Productivity
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Thunderbird is a popular free email application from Mozilla, the people behind Firefox. And just like Firefox, one of the reasons for Thunderbird’s popularity is the number of quality add-ons that are available for download.
While Thunderbird includes all of the necessary features for managing your emails by default, there are tons of add-ons that bring additional functionality which can make the application far more useful.
In this post, I’ll highlight the best Thunderbird addons that can prove useful towards a productive work day.
Thunderbird Add-Ons
Lightning
Lightning adds a calendar to Thunderbird so you can keep track of your schedule from within Thunderbird.
Organize your schedule and life’s important events in a calendar that’s fully integrated with your Thunderbird email. Manage multiple calendars, create your daily to do list, invite friends to events, and subscribe to public calendars.
Provider for Google Calendar
Provider for Google Calendar integrates Lightning with your Google Calendar.
This extension allows Sunbird and Lightning to read and write events to a Google Calendar.
QuickFolders (Tabbed Folders)
QuickFolders can help to improve the organization of your inbox.
Cut through the clutter of the folders sidebar with your favorite folders as tabs. Open folders and sub folders, move mails without scrolling around or searching.
Contacts Sidebar
Keeping track of your contacts can be much easier with Contacts Sidebar.
Displays the address books in a sidebar in Thunderbirds 3-pane-window and can be toggled with the F4 key or a toolbar button.
XNote
With as many emails as you receive each day it’s often hard to keep track of everything ad remember the context or important details surrounding the message. XNote can help by allowing you to enter a sticky note attached to messages.
XNote allows you to create a note for each mail. Thus, you can add for example the phone number of that contact or when you have to contact the sender back.
ThunderBrowse
With ThunderBrowse you can click on links within email messages and view them in a browser within Thunderbird.
Did your friend send you a cool link? Want to read the rest of that interesting article? Don’t want to open up your web browser just to view it? You don’t have to! Just view it in Thunderbird with ThunderBrowse!
Tag Toolbar
Tag Toolbar allows you to organize your inbox by adding tags to messages.
This extension adds new toolbar and display the tags you have created as toggle buttons; the added toolbar is called “Tag Toolbar” and the space for showing tags is called “Tag Bar”. You can attach/remove tags to/from the selected messages. The tag buttons’ states are changed automatically, so you can easily know what tags are attached to the message. Moreover, you can filter the tags to be displayed by categorizing tags. You can create and change category from the listbox on Tag Bar.
eMarks
With eMarks you can bookmark messages that you will want to be able to access later.
Do you have an email that will need to revisit/attend later on ? Would you like to keep it handy and get it with a simple click? Bookmark your important emails with the eMarks addon.
Quick Locale Switcher
If you communicate with clients or contacts in different languages, Quick Locale Switcher makes it easy to move between different languages.
Allows you to quickly change and apply a different locale related setting from the tools menu, the statusbar, or your Toolbar.
AttachmentExtractor
If you receive a lot of emails with attachments, AttachmentExtractor can help by unzipping and extracting those attachments.
Just select the messages containing the attachments you want to extract and select ‘Extract Attachments’ and this extension does the rest. No more having to go through each message to extract the attachments!
Nostalgy
Nostalgy can help to improve efficiency by giving you control to setup keyboard shortcuts for working with Thunderbird.
Adds keyboard shortcuts to change folder, move/copy messages, with folder name auto-completion (using only the keyboard). Same for tags. Also includes a system of rules to suggest a target folder for saving messages; re-creates Eudora’s Alt-Click; facilitates navigation in the 3-pane window; makes it easy to change between To/Bcc/Cc fields in the composer; facilitates tag-oriented operations. All that with the keyboard only!
Quicktext
If you find yourself typing the same types of emails over and over again, Quicktext can help by allowing you to use email templates.
Using Thunderbird, Quicktext is the perfect tool to help you quickly answer routine, repetitive emails. Quicktext performs both simple and complex tasks. The program can insert different signatures into your emails depending on whom you are sending the email to.
ReminderFox
ReminderFOx adds helpful functionality for setting up alerts and to-do lists.
ReminderFox displays and manages lists of reminders and ToDo’s. ReminderFox makes sure you remember all of your important dates via easy-to-use lists, alerts, and alarms, right in your browser without the need for a separate calendar program.
Send Later 3
Send Later 3 allows you to schedule messages for the future.
Changes the “Send Later” command (Ctrl+Shift+Return) in the message composition window, so that instead of merely copying the message into your Outbox so that it is sent the next time you go online or do “Send Unsent Messages”, a dialog pops up which allows you to specify when the message will be sent.
Signature Switch
Signature Switch allows you to easily manage multiple signatures.
Switch the signature on/off or choose a new one from your predefined set.
Zindus
Zindus will sync Thunderbird address book with Google.
Sync Personal Address Book or another addressbook with Google. Manage your Gmail contacts from Thunderbird. And vice-versa.
