W.F.M.H.'s blog

All recently available Mozilla ‘s applications, including we browser Firefox and mail client Thunderbird can be easily extended with help of 3rd party plugins . I just checked these available for Thunderbird and luckily found some worth using on daily basis.

Some extensions I consider a mandatory must-have:

• Enigmail [website ] adds OpenPGP message encryption and authentication to your email client. It features automatic encryption, decryption and integrated key management functionality. A really must-have for all the confidential mails.
• Disply Mail User Agent [website ] displays the icon [screenshot ] of the application with which the selected mail was written. So if the person which sent the mail you’re currently reading used i.e. Thunderbird to send the mail, a TB icon will be displayed.
• Remember Mismatched Domains [website ] adds a "Don’t warn me again about this certificate for this domain" checkbox to the Domain Mismatch and Expired Certificate warning windows. When selected the domain name and security certificate domain pair (or certificate and expiration date pair) is stored in a Firefox / Thunderbird preference and the security error dialog will be bypassed on subsequent visits.
• Quote Colors [website ] configures text and background colors for different quote levels in mail/news messages which are applied when reading or printing messages. Some other basic options like modifying message background, text and link colors are also available [screenshot ]. Very nice and useful.
• TB Header Tools [website ] allows you to modify the header detail of messages, including Subject, Sender and whatever else you want. Very handy, but beware, some people reported problems and data corruption, so make some tests prior using it to ensure you will still be able to get your mails after modifications. NOTE: the "website" link points to older version. It appears author updated this add on but did not released it via addons.mozilla.org. According to this comment , newer version (0.6.6) can be downloaded from here (recommended).

Others are still useful:

• Confirm Folder Move [website ] introduces a preference that allows users to be prompted before moving folders. Useful rather for those using IMAP than POP3, but still – it nicely prevents accidental folder structure mess-up.
• Config Date [website ] configures the ‘Date’ column and displayed date in message header [screenshot ]. Unfortunately you can only choose from the predefined formats (of which there are just five). Would love to see an option to craft my own custom format though.
• Attachement Extractor [website ] extracts all attachments from selected messages and then can delete the message, remove the attachment from the message or mark the message as read.

There’re other plugins which seems to be nice, but… there’s always something that annoys me. So see them for yourself and decide – you may still like them more than I do:

• Nested Quote Remove [website ] simply removes nested quotes when replying to a mail leaving these quoted below (configurable) threshold. From the 1st look this may be useful, but well… I lived so far without such tool and simply got no problems removing quotes by hand. Maybe if you got habit of keeping all former conversation unaltered while replying, this plugin could help you reduce your receipients’ anger from being "spammed" with unedited emails.
• Quote Collapse [website ] collapses and expands quotes – pretty handy while dealing with netiquette unaware top-poster. One thing I miss the ability to set up a folding threshold. Unfortunately this plugin is not configurable and folds every quote found, therefore I am not quite sure if I keep this one for a longer period.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 12:44 and is filed under Applications, Internet, Linux, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.