Blue Knight Sojourn of the Mind

Having decided to use Thunderbird as my E-mail program instead of others one thing became evident. If you are using Thunderbird then the add-ons or plug-ins are important because they help you do things the program alone does not.  Here are the plug-ins that I like and why I use them.

These are not in any particular order:

1.  Contact Sidebar -  The plug-in just adds a very nice little sidebard to the left side of the screen that can display any address book and allow the contacts to be selected.  I like this because it provides a quick overview to the information, together with a sync plug-in that I use it just provides easy access to contact information in all three of my address books.
2. Display Mail User Agent -  This plug-in is pretty simple. It just displays the mail agent that was used to send the E-Mail.  Why use it? It gives a quick determination of what the mail client is for the sender of the E-Mail.  Nothing special it is just a nice way to know what clients are being used.
3. Duplicate Contact Manager - This is a very nice plug-in if you have a large address book. What it does is search through the address book for duplicates and helps you resolve them.  For some other E-Mail clients this is an expensive add-on.
4. Enigmail - I am a heavy user of PGP/GPG and I like to sign all my messages to make sure that no one can claim that I said something in an E-Mail. This way I can always verify the information being sent. It also provides me the ability to encrypt the messages to people that I know or that have keys available on the PGP/GPG Server.
5. Header Scroll Extension - Why is this important? Because there seems to be a bug in Thunderbird that when you turn on all headers. They take up the whole page and have no scroll bars.  This extension assists in having the information available to you without difficulty.
6. Lightning - This is perhaps one of the best extensions introduced to Thunderbird, it gives the thunderbird Mail client the ability to have both To Do’s and Calendar features which make it work as an all in one system
7. LookOut - Do you communicate with Windows Outlook? Do those people love to send attachments, well if you ever received a winmail.dat file then this extension is for you. It takes the information sent in the E-Mails from outlook and displays it in human readable, and down loadable format.  This is a must for people communicating with Outlook.
8. SyncSW - This plug-in lets you synchronize the address book, calendar, todo’s between multiple systems and clients.  It requires registration with Schedule World servers, but I think it is worth it. The how-to for this application is located here <===

There are a few other plug-ins that I am testing, but have not decided to actually start fully using them. If I do I will amend this post.