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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."
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.
how on earth did this dire article make it through the editors process?
Its of abysmal quality and precious little substance.
You know that Thunderbird has a ways to go when the #1 extension is minimize to tray??
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
Ahhh, you young kids are so amusing. The "correct" way to quote is to add your discussion after the text you're quoting. You should also snip out the parts of the email which you are not replying to. You see, that way you can actually read the discussion from top to bottom, just like a book, and have all the relavent information in proper order. Proper netiquette which, apparently, nobody remembers or follows.
Now get off my lawn.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Why is top posting bad? If it is a conversation you are all involved in, then you shouldn't even need to scroll down. I came from a camp of bottom posters, but now I just want the email relating to me at the top. I don't see a problem anymore, and I am quite happy to ignore the previously sent emails, so they should be at the bottom.
I used to feel this way too, being one of the more pedantic, elitist, hardcore, old school netiquette snobs around. However after having lived in the real world for a while, I find the practice of full bottom posting to be far more annoying than full top posting (where "full" means the entire quoted text is preserved).
On a mailing list or active thread among many people, it quickly becomes tiresome to constantly scroll down to the start of the reply for every new email that comes in. My old school snobbery still insists that the proper method is to prune your quoted reply text to the relevant context and reply inline. But for those who are too lazy to do this (nearly everyone except us throwbacks) and as a result end up quoting the entire email, I find in this case top posting to be far more practical and sensible than bottom posting.
Most computers have more memory availible now doesn't make loading who whole rendering engine and whatnot into memory multiple times. Its inefficient, and quite frankly silly.
Why not have each application plug into a single, standalone installation of XULRunner, or some such? Redundant libraries only get loaded once that way. It saves resources and boosts performance.
Firefox on its own already uses entirely too much memory. Throw in T-Bird, make it load much of the same libraries attributing to Firefox already eating up ridiculous amounts of memory, its absurd. It makes allot more sense to just share and load the same libs. Imagine if every other project did this, and you'd have eleventy billion copies of libc not only installed on your system, but loaded into memory, or if each KDE app installed and loaded an individual copy KDElibs into memory for each application, or if each GTK app installed and loaded its own GTK libs into memory?
It's inefficient, its a waste of resources, and that doesn't change just because its Mozilla doing it.
Some of us don't want to have to reread or needlessly scroll through the entirety of multiple emails to get to the most recent response(s). Especially in longer conversations involving several people. If you've forgotten what the email was about, then you can do your scrolling. Otherwise, the part you need (the most recent bit) is right there in front of you. Efficiency!
But I guess that depends on if you're just a reader or if you're also a responder. People sending me email tend to want a response, so I prefer top-posting. YMMV. top posting is bad mkay?
I have no big beef with either top or bottom posting, provided that the author can be bothered to trim his fucking quotes. Since we live in a world where the vast majority of people can't be bothered to actually do so, the practice of fully-quoted top posting has become the norm. It doesn't help that practically every modern mail client encourages the practice. I will agree that fully-quoted bottom posting is an absolute abomination.
Provided that the author trims his quotes to a minimum, neither is all that annoying.
In other words: Theory? Meet Real World Practice. Practice? Say Hi to Ivory-Tower Theory.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
In my experience, I only need the gist of the preceding email to know what the responder is talking about. What I really need to know is what the responder is saying *right now.* Also, I don't know how many times a part of a message has been ignored or misread, leading to all kinds of confusion. It's easier if past messages are not truncated, so a clarifying (or simply repetitive) reply can be quickly and easily made just by selecting "Reply," rather than going through old correspondence looking for the error. So, ease of reading, and more information right at hand are why I choose to ignore others' netiquette.
I am not an animal! I am something worse!
Are you serious? Thunderbird has better IMAP support than any other client I've used (Outlook / Outlook Express / Evolution / Opera / Sylpheed / Windows Mail / etc.). Set it up to move deleted items to your trash IMAP folder and have it clear the trash folder on exit. Deleted messages get out of your way and there's no extra step.
I don't understand why every other IMAP client just strikes out "deleted" messages - why would you want messages you DELETED to hang around in your way until you "purge" or "expunge" it?