Since Thunderbird 3 was released, I have been exploring several new Mozilla Thunderbird extensions. Many of the new add-ons turned out to have compatibility issues or do not yet work as described or expected.

For this post I picked two well-integrated extensions that help you organize emails in Thunderbird 3.

Thunderbird’s new version comes with a bunch of novel features. I have previously mentioned tabs. But also searching emails has become a lot more convenient. You can now use operators like in Google or Gmail and results will open in a new tab.

The Mozilla Thunderbird extensions introduced here show refreshing ideas from Thunderbird’s user base.

Messages Timeline

Messages Timeline provides a visual overview of when emails were received.

The email you’re currently viewing is marked with a green dot. When you move the mouse over a light blue dot, both the dot and the respective message are highlighted in yellow. Once you click another dot, it turns green and the respective email is displayed in the message window.

This Mozilla Thunderbird extension lets you visually browse emails by date. Furthermore, when you move the mouse across different folders, it indicates the date range covered by emails in each folder. In the example below the range covered is November 23rd, 2009 to February 12th, 2010.

Are you looking for mails from a specific time frame?  If so, you can click and drag on the timeline to see only those messages. Using right-click on the timeline, you can select time frames and zoom in to distinguish between emails that arrived within a short time.

The developer has announced further features, including automatic expansion of time periods with many messages.

eMarks

Thunderbird 3 supports tabs. This way you can keep all of your conversations together and open sites like Google Wave or Twitter in Thunderbird, rather than a browser. Additionally, you can now make bookmarks in Thunderbird.

This extension, however, isn’t concerned with website bookmarks. How did you handle important emails so far? What did you do with messages that contained information you needed for reference every now and then? Did you tag or copy them into specific folders? Now you can eMark your most important eMails.

The Mozilla Thunderbird extension comes with an entry in the menu bar and a toolbar which can be turned on and off. To add an email to eMarks you have to use either one, there is no option in the right-click menu.

All further options are summarized in eMarks Help, which is also displayed below. Hopefully, future updates of this extension will allow to create folders or categories for eMarks.

There is a lot more information about Thunderbird out there. Here are just a few of the MakeUseOf highlights.

I recently covered 5 Extensions For Tabbed Email Browsing In Thunderbird 3. If you have ever wondered How To Recover Deleted eMails or How To Terminally Delete eMails in Thunderbird, you’ll love to read my respective articles. Furthermore, I explained How to Set Up Message Filters In Thunderbird and How To Integrated Google Calendar Into Thunderbird. Mark showed you how to Synchronize Your Google Contacts, Calendar & RSS In Thunderbird. Saikat demonstrated How to Set Up Mozilla Thunderbird to Send Mass Emails.

How do you successfully manage your emails? What email tasks are you struggling with?

Tagged: addons • email client • email management • email tips • productivity • thunderbird