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Must-Have Extensions for Thunderbird 2.0
Operator writes "While Firefox has been in the spotlight for some time now, Thunderbird has yet to enjoy the same wide adoption or glowing praise despite being an excellent email client. It's no surprise that a popular topic has been Firefox's best (and worst) extensions while Thunderbird add-ons have gone largely unnoticed. In celebration of the recent release of Thunderbird 2.0 here are the best extensions for the program along with some honorable mentions."
I still don't understand why I need to have multiple copies of gecko shared libraries / dlls in memory since the split-up of mozilla into firefox, thunderbird, and sunbird. How is this waste of space supposed to be more efficient?
Enigmail adds OpenPGP message encryption and authentication to your email client. It features automatic encryption, decryption and integrated key management functionality. Enigmail requires GnuPG (www.gnupg.org) for the cryptographic functions. Note: GnuPG is not part of the installation.
It's not complete yet, but it's already worth using it, IMO. Having a calendar integrated with my mail helps me to check my schedule as regularly as I check my mail.
I find this extension to be helpful when dealing with certain email issues. It displays an icon representing the user's email software if it's in the known list of mail agents.
- 1.3.2.xpi
Home Page: http://cweiske.de/misc_extensions.htm
Extension Link: http://www.cweiske.de/files/download/misc/dispmua
List of Supported Agents: http://cweiske.de/misc_extensions_dispmuas.htm
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
Runners-up: Dictionary Switcher, View Headers Toggle Button, Contacts Sidebar.
It also mentions "Mozilla has three recommended extensions, Foxytunes, Enigmail, and an adblocker"
Now that the great Eudora is dead (no more updated), the Penelope project will bring Eudora's goodies to Thunderbird.
Just wait for Penelope, a better Thunderbird than Thunderbird !
-- Rastignac was here.
Alternatively, you can use my preferred method for eliminating the giant 200-line quoted message bombs that appear below a two-word response. Just bitch at the person repeatedly until they either start deleting the old e-mail quotes themselves or they just stop e-mailing you. Either way, problem solved.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
I've recently tried Thunderbird 2 on a WinXP system, where I'd like it to replace Outlook Express. Feature-wise Thunderbird 2 seems to offer everything I need and it wasn't too hard to find them. However, Thunderbird 2 seems a lot slower than Outlook Express. Another annoyance was that Thunderbird 2 orders mails by send date, not received date: Spam often has a bullshit received date, making them pop-up all over my inbox, instead of neatly at the end where I can filter them out more easily. Even though I block well over 90% of spam, I still get a few hundred each day, so it's of some importance to me that I can manually filter spam easily.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
how on earth did this dire article make it through the editors process?
Its of abysmal quality and precious little substance.
I tried Thunderbird 1.5. (on Windows XP).
What it really lacked was integrated back-up/restore functions. (Outlook has this - export/import.)
I am not saying MS Outlook is the best, only that mail/account export/import functions should be present in e-mail program and you should not look for some extention or dig in support pages for this, it shoud just work.
By the way, does anybody now if thisis solved in TB 2.0.? (I would really try it once more if it has it)
Taco are you trying to feed the trolls?
Slashdot : news for nerds, payed fpr by Mozilla and Google.
I like muppets.
...make it faster. For whatever reason, Thunderbird is dog slow for me. When I use my Outlook on Windows for work - that is much faster at processing email.
Thunderbird just sits there for 30+ seconds when attempting to view a new message.
Rather than create a bunch of extensions hardly anyone would use... improve it's existing features first
Sorry to be so blunt, I'll try to explain what I mean. Whichever way you look at it, Firefox is the gold standard of browsers. It is more standard compliant and easier to use than IE, more compatibly than Konqueror, and much more extensible and better looking than Opera. While you can find better browsers for niche applications (lynx on telnet), there is no general purpose browser that comes even close to Firefox.
Thunderbird on the other hand is just a lot of promises. It still uses folders, while labels are obviously the way to go. Threading is poor. Integration between different message sources is basically non-existent. The search function sucks really badly. There is no integration with any reasonable calender (and don't call sunbird reasonable). And it is actually difficult to use, certainly compared to the competition (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, Opera, KMail...).
I mean seriously: can Thunderbird even sort threads on the date of the most recent message in a thread? Last time I tried it could not. GMail does that by default, and it is by far the most sensible way to order messages. Make Thunderbird not suck, and I will give it another try.
You know that Thunderbird has a ways to go when the #1 extension is minimize to tray??
How could they overlook the redirect extension? Come on people, its a feature that we've had in most other mail clients since at least the 80's. But yet its an extension for thunderbird.
Its always the first thing I install for thunderbird, and comes in handy many times.
While we're slightly off-topic, my vote goes to sylpheed
I use it at home on my linux box, and it runs just fine as a portable app (sylpheed --configdir=foo) from the USB stick when forced to use somebody else's computer on the road (IMAP over SSL along with SMTP Auth and SMTP with Starttls to my home server).
A very nice lightweight mail client, with some good improvements to the UI in the 2.4 version that was recently released.
If you enjoy having more crap built-in (like rendering HTML), check out claws, which is a fork of sylpheed.
Isn't that a feature, not a bug? The malformed date tag is a spam indicator. So it is good Thunderbird will put it at the top of the list, out of sight. Just mark the folder read. If you have legitimate correspondent using legal software has wrong dates, it is because his/her machine is riddled with viruses. So dont want to read their mail either. For a long time Outlook express used to mess up the subject tag and in Thunderbird (older versions) the subject line was missing, and thus filed in spam folder. A few of my collegues bitched, but I held firm. The problem is in Outlook or they way they have configured Outlook. All mails from yahoo, gmail, hotmail were coming through correctly. I will not work around the bugs of Outlook just because it is ubiquitous. I refused to edit my filter rules or whitelist them. I dont know what/when/who fixed it. Now a days Outlook is sending mails correctly. I think so. I have not looked at the spam folder for a long time. May be they just gave up on me and stopped bitching.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Does back-up and restore works on TB 2.0 out of the box (like some function in file or tools menu)? Or you need some extra add-on or browse in support pages to fing out how.
I was surprised that Enigmail wasn't listed; for GPG integration into email, it's a great tool, simple to use. I've even got some of the departments that deal with sensitive data at work using it, and they are _not_ technical people by inclination.
--saint
That allows message filters to run on the body of IMAP messages? That's pretty basic functionality for Thunderbird to still be missing, given how long it's been a known issue. And yes, I've tried the "might work-arounds", and they don't.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I agree, and in fact for me the article lost credibility for recommending against Enigmail -- Enigmail is a must have. If we're ever going to have digital signatures become the norm (something I'd like to see) then the advanced users are going to have to model it for the neophytes. Digitally sign every email you send, and when people ask why you do it, spoof an "I'm joining a cult" email from them to their friends. I'm pretty confident that eventually only signed emails will be delivered -- be ahead of the curve!
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
I'll second this...
After thunderbird destroyed my local mail store once a week (admittedly I could go in and fix the mailbox files by hand with some effort, trial, and error), I went back to KMail in KDE and Outlook Express in Window, both of which have never had corrupted mailboxes in my use of them, and I have been using both much longer.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
you can just copy what you want out of the profiles folder/mail store folder and paste it back in if you need to.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Id love to be able to sort and delete all my damn hotmail someday... i'm waiting for a hotmail client. Or Thunderbird to do it up. Thunderbirds apparently used to work but not anymore..
After fighting with Evolution and Thunderbird, I've given up. I just have gmail pop all my mail. Not only does this eliminate the hassle of checking my mail from multiple machines, but gmail actually handles meeting requests properly. (Evolution never seems to recognize the timezones of any meeting requests I get... so all the meetings were scheduled for the wrong time, and Evolution wouldn't even let me change them).
I use the webmail extension to check my hotmail account. The only time I have had problems in the last year was when hotmails interface changed but that was fixed in a day.
:(){
Virtual Identity is essential if you, like many of us, maintain more addresses per inbox than can be conveniently managed via Thunderbirds's stock identity manager.
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. BB
I've used Thunderbird for years... and it quite regularly corrupts my local mail store. I have a bag of tricks for dealing with it. It is always in very minor ways though: Can't delete attachments, can't find an email via search even though it is there. A few messages that sort wrong, etc. The problem with most of these is they are intermittent so I can't reproduce them reliably any more.
You can order by receive date. Click on the icon on the right side of the column header of the preview pane to see all the column headings that are available, and select "Order Received". That adds a column to the display which is a message number that is incremented as each message is received.
You can sort messages by the contents of any column by clicking on the column header. Click again to sort in the opposite order. So once you have an Order Received column, click on its heading to have messages sorted by the received date instead of the Send Date. The sort order you select is remembered when you exit and restart Thunderbird.
I like tbird - really. I like it more than outlook, for certain.
However, I wish there were a WM(5/6) client that would sync through activesync. Call WM any names you want (I've used most of the profane ones at some point in the past 5 years) - but it's on practically all poratble devices that aren't named after a small fruit or body part (hmm, well it does have significant marketshare, even if I coulnd't say "most").
I'm tempted every now and then to want to switch to outlook for the simple reason that it Just Works (TM) with my mobile device. Then I remember how much I hated outlook for email when I used it, and I decide it's better not to have email at all than to use outlook. (I'd switch entirely to mozilla if they had a decent calendar and contact program which would sync with my mobile...but I've resigned myself that that will never happen)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Bless the heart of the David Perry for autorewrap. I detested having manually rewrap when replying in Thunderbird. This worked great under 1.5 but now no longer works with 2.0. Please update for 2.0 David!
Speak truth to power.
Before some random dork starts spouting about how Thunderbird sux0rs because open source doesn't have an end-to-end Outlook/Exchange replacement...
:)
Thunderbird+Lightning connected to a Citadel server does the job quite nicely. Mail, calendar, contacts, all server-side and end-to-end, 100 percent open source.
Thanks for asking.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I'm using:
Show InOut: adds a column to the thread pane which shows whether you or someone else wrote the message. This is useful if you want both incoming and outgoing messages in the same folder
Mnenhy: Among other things, allows you to have different columns shown in the thread pane, depending upon which folder you're viewing.
GMailUI: Among other things, improved searching of your folders.
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
Thunderbird uses the mbox format, which is not really a suitable way of storing more than 10 emails. IMAP would be a better alternative, if the IMAP support wasn't as pathetic as it is.
Options usually work if you just try them.
Enigmail is a must, it's PGP encryption of email.
If you've never been a sysadmin, then you don't know what us sysadmins do all day, WE READ YOUR EMAILS AND LAUGH AT THEM. Sometimes we make the equivalent of blooper reels to send around to each other at Christmas.
"Ahh, John in accounts is cheating on Wendy his wife with Doris in Marketing. Here's the email where he accidently forwards to the wife instead of the girlfriend".
The only thing I'd like in Enigmail is automated key exchanges, so that email sent between two Thunderbird users that have Enigmail automatically causes the public keys to be exchanged.
The only add-on I use is TagZilla, which adds a randomly selected tagline from a file to every email. I'm so attached to this that I won't upgrade to newer versions of Thunderbird until TagZilla supports them.
:-)
I have people ask me all the time how I get those randomly selected tags on my emails. Of course the answer starts with "First off, you have to be using Thunderbird..."
I don't use a lot - just the Auto Copy, Image Zoom and MR Tech Local Install extensions.
.xpi file, if necessary. Useful for when you upgrade either Firefox or Thunderbird and your extensions suddenly stop working - you can force them to work. Or at least try to work. I had to use that to get Image Zoom working in Thunderbird 2.0, although I think it's not necessary any more with the most recent version of Image Copy.
Auto Copy, so I can copy text to the clipboard just by highlighting it (no need to press Ctrl+C).
Image Zoom, so Thunderbird will reduce the size of images to fit the message view pane. Without it, you have to scroll around a lot for large images.
MR Tech Local Install so I can force extensions to ignore the maxversion setting in the
http://autocopy.mozdev.org/
http://imagezoom.yellowgorilla.net/
http://www.mrtech.com/extensions/local_install/
- ozz
Thunderbird doesn't natively have the ability to import vCards mailboxes (Come on Mozilla!), but Morecols allows you to import and expert vCards. It should be on everyone's list, although the developer doesn't list it on Mozilla's Add-ons site (get with it Kaosmos!).
That works. Or you can use MozBackup: http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/
it ain't as good as other mail programs
Firefox was clealry superior to other browsers; thunderbird is not clearly superior to outlook (the only program i am familiar with) and, imo, is markedly inferior in many ways
which brings us to the central truth of open source software: most users use software as tool to get something done; when they are free to choose (as in the browser or mail program used at home) they will willing ly select open source if it is better; they will not if if aint better
If someone wants to have a discussion of why tb ain't so good, great - it might acutally lead to something.
I use Thunderbird with IMAP and it works without problems... it's the best IMAP mailer I've found. I'll take a look at Sylphe, do you know if it has IMAP notification? KMAIL is really slow on IMAP and even when I try it once in a while, it takes a long till I get the new mail notification.
Donde Ser Geek No Duele
A must-have from 1.5 that the last time I checked had not moved to 2.0 (at least not for T-Bird on the Mac.)
I don't know if its already in Thunderbird but I couldn't find it. I want my Inbox mails to be group by the 'From' field. Is it possible or is there any extension to do it?
Lord of the Binges.
This article really is pretty fuckin weak. I only downloaded one of the big bad 4 "best" extensions. Seriously, be a little more inventive. Four extensions does not equal "OMGZ best EVAR!!!11111!!!1!" list.
Geeks strike again 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
No one mentioned the External Editor extension yet? Nice to be able to kick off your favorite editor without cut-n-pasting. Something every mail client should have, but maybe I'm just old fashioned.
...Thunderbird add-ons have gone largely unnoticed... For Thunderbird to be worthy of having "must have" extensions, Thunderbird itself should be a "must have". It's not. There's still too many little annoyances.Regarding popular use of Enigmail and GPG, one thing I've come to realize is that there needs to be an easy-to-access public key infrastructure. By this, I mean not just the existence of GPG key servers, which already exist, but an easy and user-friendly way to get anyone's key.
For example, the other day I was composing an email message, and thought, "I should encrypt this." But I didn't have the recipient's public key. (I think the recipient was a software developer of a program I had just downloaded.) I told my software, Kgpg, to get the key, but it couldn't find it on the default keyserver. So I went to another keyserver, but it timed out, and yet another keyserver didn't have the key. So then I Googled for it, and finally found the guy's public key.
I thought about how encryption worked for web sites and services like Hushmail. When I go to the bank's website, I don't need to Google for my bank's "public key" --the SSL certificate is already on file at the certificate authority, Verisign or whatever it is. You just say, "I want the Royal Bank website" (or whatever bank it is) and your browser already comes built-in with the ability to go to the right place to get the right key. When people sign onto Hushmail, Hushmail will keep track of the OpenPGP public keys.
In the same way, there needs to be, not just one or more keyservers, but a publicly recognized need for one central key repository or network of cross-mirrorring key repositories, that programs can just go to. When I set up Kgpg (or Enigmail or whatever), I shouldn't have to choose which keyserver to go to; it should come with a default (which it does) that works (which it doesn't). Note that this is not the fault of any one program, but the fact that no one keyserver has achieved critical mass, so that everyone will put his/her key on that one server and expect other people to find it.
I used to think that this one server would be the MIT keyserver, at pgp.mit.edu. But in the recent years, I've found that most keys you can't find on there. The keyserver has been timing out, and if this has been the norm, then I can see why people don't want to put their keys on there. You can put your key on more than one server, but then which "more than one" server do you choose? Kgpg is set up to query pgp.dtype.org and wwwkeys.us.pgp.net; is that what the rest of you have been using as well?
Of course, the whole point of having something like GPG is that there is no one central authority to turn evil and bring down the entire infrastructure, and to that end I love having the trust ratings on the GPG keys. But there needs to be more access to GPG keys so that some flag can come up on people's email software: "Encryption available for this recipient --want to use it?" As it is, I would have to somehow find out that the recipient has heard of GPG, say, "Hey, you know about GPG? Do you use it? I do! What's your public key," etc. etc.
Enigmail is a great boon for promoting GPG, but we need more infrastructure before we can get it to the same popularity as, say, MySpace or even just Slashdot.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I've found that this is a pain-in-the ass when migrating from 1.0 to 2.0. It seems like they changed the folder structure now, so it's no longer "New TB folder" = "New folder on disk".
(either that or I don't know what I'm doing with 2.0)
It still kills me that it can import from outlook / mozilla suite, but it can't do something simple like import from an older version or a flat mbox file.
Steven V>
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
Its jigawatt, not gigawatt!
I recently downloaded Thunderbird 2.0 and was surprised to see that it was basically the same application as before, except that the icons were slightly prettier and I could no longer find the junk mail controls. Address book handling is still obsolete, as well as editing entries (editing a person's name is awkward, as typing a first and last name may actually require you to edit *three* fields - go figure.) One particular annoyance is that you can only store two emails for each contact. Many of my close friends have work, home, and cell phone, so this is a bit of an annoyance for me. Rule editing is also crufty; you cannot move rules across mail accounts, and there is no way to base a new rule off of an old one - also, basing a rule off of a message is only useful if it is set to filter based on that particular sender's address. Threading is over-complicated, split across two sub-menus, and rife with unnecessary options that usually end up with new users unintentionally hiding their emails.
I have always had a soft spot for the children of Netscape, but Thunderbird hasn't seen a serious reworking since it was split off from the original program. Let me know when the developers release a serious update, and I'll take another look. Until then, I will continue to use the PortableApp version of Thunderbird to check my email at work; it's not that it doesn't work, it's just that it lacks elegance.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Well I don't exactly miss it because I still have it on my old iMac, but it has all sorts of stuff I liked like customizable email alerts so I could assign sounds to each email recipients much like custom ringtones. The filtering had so many wonderful options and I really liked the signature randomizer feature where I kept all those bon mots I gleamed from /.
I've gone to Firefox/Thunderbird on my PC laptop which I use more often but I miss all those old features when I'm away from my iMac. It sits idling with Entourage open and the sound on so I still get all the alerts, but I await such handy features in Thunderbird.
I think they'll come though. I love Firefox more than any browser I've ever seen and figure they'll get there.
I've been looking for an extension to sort mail into folders based on a header field. Anyone heard of such a thing?
I uses Leetkey with Thunderbird for news reading in forums that use ROT13 frequently.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It appears there is no way for Thunderbird to interface with an Exchange server which DOES NOT have IMAP enabled. All the docs about Thunderbird+Exchange assume that IMAP is enabled, which is not the case for my company's server (the IT guys refused to enable it).
Is there really no Thunderbird extension for this? I understand the Exchange protocol is proprietary and thus needs to be reverse-engineered, but Evolution has to a large extent succeeded in doing this. Wouldn't it be possible to make a Thunderbird extension using the Evolution code as a reference? Or maybe the demand just isn't there, as most people just use Outlook or, if they don't, their Exchange server has IMAP enabled. Which means I'm screwed.
IMO it is the top-down, x.500-inspired PKI that needs to change to become more like PGP's system. The current system is fairly useless at the moment, but it is so, so profitable for the lucky few companies who are blessed by having their CA certificates included by operating system and application vendors.
This *should* be a good thing, if done right.
I ask that someone make an extension called "Just Show Me My Damn Mail" that works like View -> Message Source
Because I still don't know how to turn off all the stupid formatting that Thunderbird insists on. For example, changing
> quoted text
> quoted text
to
| quoted text
| quoted text
(blue bars)
and *strong* to *strong* ...and so on.
One might expect that the first, basic function of a mail program is to display the mail...
Doesn't anyone else use Quote Colors? You know, to fix the broken quote system? If it weren't for that extension, I'd still be using Thunderbird 1.0.8.
Why Thunderbird still doesn't have a Purge/Expunge/Compact button by default (at least available, if not already on the toolbar) is a mystery to me. Do they just not care about IMAP users? It's rather annoying to have to hunt down an extension to get that one toolbar button every time i upgrade or install Thunderbird on a new computer.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Thunderbird ships with "message filters," which do exactly this. (There are various extensions which improve filtering if this doesn't seem to be enough.)
It also has virtual search folders, which make it easy to find a message based on criteria (including header content)
Is there a thunderbird extension for rotating .sigs? It's one of the few things I miss from my old school email days...
My Journal
Thunderbird's LDAP support sucks.
What could make it suck less?
- Let me browse my complete LDAP addressbook. Currently you can only search for contacts.
- Let me add entries. Yes, it doesn't add entries to ldap addressbooks.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
> praise despite being an excellent email client
Since when? I have been using Thunderbird since last 3 yrs and its just an average (or below) email client. Even though inline spell checker was introduced in Thunderbird 1.5, its just OK and definitely not comparable to Outlooks's spelling and grammar check. Also lot of times it just seems to download an email forever.
Cant forget the ugly bug where in it says "The content of this mail can be downloaded on demand"...From where? Theres no 'download now' button'.
Just because Firefox is a great product and Thunderbird is from same guys as Firefox, doesn't mean Thunderbird is great too. Its definitely NOT!
http://freenigma.com/ - the freenigma plugin for firefox offers encryption and signing of mail with gmail, I think they are planning support for yahoo mail also.
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
Slideshow is extremely useful for people who get a lot of pictures via email, and just want to look at them quickly.
it quite regularly corrupts my local mail store
In fairness, I have used and supported Thunderbird and Seamonkey at many businesses for years, and I've never seen the actual data get corrupted. It uses good old mbox format for the mail store, which is just a simple text file.
I have seen the indexes, stored in separate files, become corrupted far too often, though they can easily be rebuilt.
Just use MozBackup to backup and restore. Works with Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Suite and Netscape.
It allows you to backup and restore bookmarks, mail, contacts, history, extensions, cache etc.
Been using it for ages, it's one of the handiest tools I've got.
Cheers!
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Since when did one user's opinion become a must have collection of addons for thunderbird? Oh, I know, since Taco decided to post this ridiculous review of TB extensions, windoze centric, and the guy doesn't think that enigmail is useful for him which speaks volumes, in plaintext, of course.
Salut,
Jacques
I have yet to find a reason to have thunderbird.
Happy opera fan.
Sylpheed is nice if you don't need/want certain features. I wanted to be able to see HTML e-mail (and use dillo a lot anyway) and spellcheck so I switched to claws. I wish they'd kept an option for the separate folder window though.
But either of them is faster than Thunderbird (I formerly used Thunderbird) and IMHO bogofilter works just a touch better than Thunderbird's built in filtering.
MS Passport was similar. A centralized authentication area shared amongst not just Microsoft users but affiliates as well. Rather than have a single, central keyserver so you can form a committee to determine who's the least unethical company to run it, why not have the ISPs hold their own keyservers?
keys.gmail.com
keys.netscape.net
keys.ucla.edu
etc etc
That way, it's obvious where to look and you can do an ldap search using your cool built-in LDAP functionality in Thunderbird to look up their public keys, which can be stored in LDAP.
All I know is that once a week I got a complaint of a corrupted mail box. I could only fix it by going in, and deleting a certain message. It varied which message, but I would make a back up, and delete them one at a time until I found the right one, copy the backup to the original, and then go in and delete the correct mail.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Everyone is entitled to have their own favorite extensions but there is nothing really in the cited article that makes Sal Cangeloso's selection special in any way. Personally I find Enigmail and Spamato4Thunderbird essential for my own personal use, but I would not expect this to be more of a universally valid recommendation than anyone else's.
Display Quota
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
The only one extension I really use is reply-to-list. Unfortunatly it needs a patch to thunderbird, which fortunatly is in Debian. This was so far the main reason why I was always trying different mail programs. The bugzilla entry is there since the mozilla suite days IIRC, and it still hasn't been addressed. Reading the discussion there it also seems to me like the mozilla developers sometimes put _way_ too much emphasis on "making it simple for noobs" and totally forget that it was the power users who are the ones sticking with them from the beginning. The patch making the reply to list possible has been around for quite a while, so the argument: "if you want functunality code it yourself" does not fly either.
I have installed Sylpheed and it doesn't have anything like IMAP notification... and it's pretty ugly! Thunderbird is the best mailer for IMAP, and if you don't agree, show me the app and I will install it and try it.
Donde Ser Geek No Duele
Are you using it with IMAP!???
Donde Ser Geek No Duele
This problem sounds like it is caused by the Winifred factor. Mozilla Foundation is headed by someone who doesn't know or care about technical issues. There simply is very little discipline within the organization; bugs that matter a lot to users don't get fixed. See Firefox development sometimes resembles playing.
Many problems with Mozilla products seem caused by some kind of overuse of OS resources. I haven't been able to determine more than that. Bugs in Thunderbird and Firefox can actually cause Microsoft Windows to be unstable. (In Linux, you can just kill the Mozilla process and continue using the OS.)
In 5 or 6 years of discussing this, Mozilla developers have shown no interest in fixing it. Instead, they give at least 20 excuses. (See the list.)
Weirdly, Thunderbird and Firefox bugs actually interact, sometimes.
Actually, you can kill Firefox in windows too... But you have to kill the process not the task sometimes (sadly, yes, there's a difference).
I've had to do it several times, especially when running it with java applets.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
I'll be sticking with TB 1.5 until a bug that has been present in all 2.x versions so far is fixed. It is very annoying and applies to IMAP (maybe POP3 too) accounts. It seems like the mail notifier is broken because whenever a new message arrives, any previously unread messages get marked as read. Damn annoying!
Last time I went looking for some Thunderbird extensions, they were very hard to find. They were buried in with all the other Firefox extensions.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad