Top 10 Must Have Add-Ons for ThunderBird

ThunderBird is a great email client. It works fast, is free and its expandable. I am sure you understand fast and free. But what do I mean by expandable? Well, being an open source project from the people that brought you your friendly Firefox, Thunderbird has extra bits of software called extensions. These extensions adds functionality to Thunderbird. Below I have list the 10 most deservings extensions. I strongly recommended that you try them out. You will like them. A caveat though, 1 or 2 have not been updated to work with the latest version of Thunderbird(2.0)

Top 10 Must Have Add-Ons for ThunderBird
1. Text size toolbar: Adds text size buttons to the toolbar.
I never really quite figured out why the increase/decrease font size button was missing. I placed this number 1 as it seem to be such a basic feature that it should not even be an add-on.

2. Lightning: An integrated calendar for Thunderbird
Outlook has Calenders. Thunderbird sadly does not have one built in by default. Thanks to the Lightning people, we have calenders to boast about too. You can even have multiple calenders. One for home, one for office etc.

3. Contacts Sidebar: Displays the address books in a sidebar in Thunderbirds 3-pane-window
Makes contacts really easily searchable. Given that TBird saves all the names and emails of everyone you have contact with, you should be able to find anyone's email in a jiffy.

4. MinimizeToTray: Minimizes Mozilla windows into the system tray
Usually when we press the red X at the top right of Tbird, it will close TBird. However heavy users might actually want it to go to the system tray so that it can monitor incoming emails

5. Image Zoom: Adds zoom functionality for images
Self explanatory I guess...

6. Auto Zip Attachments: Auto Zip Attachments allows you to easily compress (zip) attachments.
Multiple files? Need to compress them? This extension does it for you!

7. Signature Switch: Switch the signature on/off or choose a new one from your predefined set
Sending emails to different people mean different signatures. Do you still manually type the signature every time? I hope not as that would be wasting a lot of time. Try saving signatures and selecting them when you need them.

8. Quicktext: Quicktext is an extension for Thunderbird that lets you create templates that can be easily inserted into your own emails.
Like Signature Switch, but for everything else non Signature

9. Advanced Remove Duplicates: Extends Folder-Context-Menu with a Button to delete Duplicate Messages
I usually need this when I import mails from other computers. Sometimes I will end up with multiple emails so using this extension can reduce the storage needed.

10. XNote: Persistent sticky notes for Thunderbird associated to mails

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.