10 Mozilla Thunderbird Extensions To Boost Your Productivity

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Many of us use Mozilla Thunderbird at work/home to check email. It’s got a great feature to extend functionality through 3rd party extensions or plug-ins.

Here’s my pick of 10 thunderbird extensions (in no particular order) that will help you get things done quickly. These have been proven to improve productivity at work across years.

1. Mail Tweaks – Few tweaks to enhance your email experience, the major ones are
   • Collected Reply – When you’re reply to more than one email where you’d want to send the same email response.
   • Message Font – Ever hated that Thunderbird never auto-selects your default font? With this you can set the font type and size for composing.
   • Colored Replies – Do you change the email reply font color when replying? This’ll can help you do that every time.
   • Personalize messages – Do you often send Multi cast email? This plug-in would help you write “Hi %firstname%” email to automatically substitute a name of the recipient for each email sent.
   • Status Icons – Marks the emails with icons to check if an email was replied/forwarded.
   • Multiple Search Windows – We all know mailbox is full of clutter after a few years of use. This feature helps keep more than one search window open.
     

2. Blunder Delay
   People using MS Outlook would understand the comfort of sending the email in the background. Blunder Delay does exactly that for Thunderbird. You can direct the email to go to the Outbox folder and then Blunder Delay would clear out that every ‘x’ (configurable) minutes. Here’s more details on configuring it.

3. Signature Switch
   If you’re using Mozilla Thunderbird for more than one email accounts and wish to have different signatures between them, this is the plug-in for you. This will help you turn on/off and switch between signatures while composing the email.
4. PasteCode
   If you’re a software developer and often email code snippets in Java/C/C++ or javascript, this extension automatically formats the keywords in the code making it readable.  You need to use the new right click option “Paste Code” after installing this extension.
   
5. Table2Clipboard
   A less popular but very useful plugin to ensure that tables from the email are copied properly into external tools like Microsoft excel/word without corruption the columns. I’ve personally been using it for years as I use tables a lot in my emails.
6. Lightning / Lightning Button / Calendar Tweaks
   These are actually 3 extensions which go together to give you a complete calendar experience using Mozilla Thunderbird.
   • Lightning although still a ‘beta’ product (are you reading this Mozilla? Countries at war even made peace while we wait for the final build) provides you event scheduling capabilities from within Mozilla Thunderbird. It supports the usual protocols to read your calendar off the server and you can also create an offline calendar.
     
   • Lightning Button – Just having Lightning extension installed doesn’t just help till you get the calendar buttons on your toolbar. This extension provides you one click buttons to create a new task/event etc.
     
   • Calendar Tweaks – The default lightning installation doesn’t highlight recurring events. This plug-in mimics how the calendar looks like in MS Outlook.
     

7. Minimize to Tray Plus
   This application does exactly what the title says. It minimizes the Mozilla thunderbird instance into the applications tray bar. Thunderbird will continue to keep checking for emails in the background and can alert you when a new email arrives. The application can be restored from the task tray. You can even over-ride Thunderbird to minimize to tray even when the ‘close button’ is pressed.
   
8. Keyword Highlight
   Ever missed out an important email because you didn’t scan the content well enough? This extension highlights word(s) in a customizable color which then are easily noticeable so that you won’t miss that email again.
   
9. Mark All As Read Button
   When you’re back from a vacation your mail box is full of unread emails most of which you’d want to mark all the emails or a particular thread as read. This’ll save your time by marking most of the irrelevant threads as read with just a single button click.
   
10. Thunderbird Message Filters Export/Import
    Just as the title says, this helps you to export and import your huge list of filters for those who don’t/can’t use server side filters. It’s a pain to re-create the same filters across multiple machines. If only there is a Mozilla Sync for Thunderbird as well.