Five Important Add-ons for Mozilla Thunderbird 3

Mozilla Thunderbird 3 has a lot of nice new features available, including tabs and a new slimmer look and feel. So why not make sure you have some usable add-ons to go with your new Mozilla Thunderbird. I have picked out 5 of the add-ons I use most often and believe they might be of value to you as well.

1) Extra Folder Columns

It seems that when upgrading Thunderbird to version 3 some of the necessary functionalities I was so used to fell by the way side. Thanks to the creator of this add-on, I can once again see the extra columns in the left pane I was so used to seeing: Unread Emails, Total Emails and Size for each of the folders. For someone with one or two email accounts this might not seem like such a big feature, but I manage 7 email accounts through Mozilla Thunderbird, so it is a necessity to me.

2) Account Color

This is another add-on which might seem nicer if you have multiple accounts in Thunderbird. The one feature I appreciate the most is being able to associate a font and background color to an account and use those in the header portion of an email (the from, subject, to section). This allows you to see at a glance which account the email belongs to. You can even color code the header sent of an email you are composing, so you know which account you are sending from. That is one awesome feature in my book.

3) Restart Thunderbird

This is inspired by the "Restart Firefox" add-on and at first I thought it was unnecessary. I mean the only time I thought you would ever want to restart Thunderbird would be after installing an add-on, which allows you to restart Thunderbird. However, I have found this add-on to be useful, especially when it seem Thunderbird is becoming just a bit sluggish.

4) Lightning

While Mozilla has been nice to release Sunbird, a stand-alone calendar program, I like the idea of having an integrated calendar in my email program. Yes, this might seem a little bit of an "Outlook" type approach. I personally like being able to add things to my calendar right from inside my email program. Give it a spin and hopefully you will like this add-on as well.

5) MinimizeToTray Plus

As a user of Ubuntu Linux, I use Alltray, a program to send items to the system tray, but do not like this approach. This plugin allows me to send Thunderbird to the system tray by selecting "Minimize to Tray" from the File menu.

Many More Add-ons

While I have taken the time to The Mozilla Thunderbird Add-on site offers these and many more add-on you might find of use.