Moving forward with Thunderbird

Although I’ve been using Thunderbird at work now for almost a year, the only extension I’ve had installed has been Lightning to display my work calendar.

Yesterday that changed, and I’m really glad. I’ve installed a few excellent extensions:

Quote Colurs adds inline colouring to nested replies. I didn’t think this would make much difference, but it’s suddenly made mailing lists a joy.

QuickMenu MC adds the folders you most frequently move mails directly under the “Move To” menu (so that you don’t have to navigate four or more menus down)

GmailUI adds a new option to the search box allowing GMail-like search syntax such as “from:andy” “to:phil” and so on. This is now essential to me – I use GMail all the time at home, and I’ve been constantly typing GMail-syntax searches into the Thunderbird search box in vain til now.

Thunderbird Header Tools allows you to change the headers of emails (I use this for editing subject lines to reflect the action I have to take on the mail) and add new headers; built-in is the ability to add X-Tags and X-Categories, which you can then create Smart Folders for, so that you can effectively tag mails and have them appear in certain folders automatically. Genius!

Thunderbird QuickMove assigns a shortcut key-combo to moving mails to certain folders. CTRL+1 now moves mails from my Inbox to my “Archive” folder. So now I can move mails quickly either by keyboard, or by mouse (via QuickMenu MC, above).

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