Using Thunderbird’s advanced features and a few nifty extensions, you can turn a humble email client into a fine-tuned productivity tool. The following guide shows you how.

Filters allow you to automatically sort incoming emails into specified folders. They are great time-savers that can help to keep your Inbox nice and tidy without you lifting a finger. Let’s take a concrete example that shows how to configure and use a simple filter. If you stumble upon an interesting website, and you want to keep a copy of it, you can email it to yourself. Many websites provide an “email this page” feature, or you can use the excellent Toread service. This can come in quite handy not only if you want to keep a copy of an interesting article, but also if you want to read something later or when off-line. If you use this facility often, you can end up with copies of web pages scattered all over your Inbox. A better solution would be to create a separate folder and define a filter that puts the incoming web page copies in it.

Figure 1: Creating a simple message filter

To create a new folder, right-click on your email account in the Folders pane and choose the New Folder menu item. Give the folder a name (for example, “Toread”), and press OK. The first thing you have to do in order to create an effective filter is to figure out what email message criteria to use. Filters in Thunderbird offer a myriad of criteria allowing you to create rather sophisticated sorting tools. In our case, though, you can use just a single rule based on the sender’s address (assuming that you are using the Toread service). Choose Tools → Message Filters, press the New button, and type the name of the filter in the Filter Name field. From the first drop-down list, select From, set the second drop-list to “is”, and type the appropriate email address (in this case, info@toread.cc) into the last field. In the Perform these actions section, select Move Message from the first drop-down list, and select the Toread folder from the second list. The finished filter should look like the one in figure 1. Press OK to save the settings and close the window, and make sure that the filter is enabled (the Active check box should be ticked). If you already have emails from the Toread service in your Inbox, you might want to run the filter right away by pressing the Run Now button. This moves all the existing Toread messages to the specified folder – and from now on any incoming email that matches the criteria specified in the filter will be automatically moved to the Toread folder.

Another Thunderbird’s useful tool is Smart Folders. This nifty feature allows you to save your searches as a virtual folder. Using Smart Folders, you can specify a set of search criteria, then save the search and view it as a conventional folder. For example, instead of using a filter to move messages from the Toread service into the specified folder, you can create a smart folder. The main difference between the two approaches is that the smart folder is not a real folder and no messages are actually moved into it. In other words, the smart folder is just a virtual folder, and every time you select it, it runs the specified search and displays the results.

Figure 2: Creating a saved search, a.k.a smart folder

There are several ways to create a smart folder. The fastest way is to type your search criteria into the Quick Search field, then select Save Search as a Folder from the drop-down list. Alternatively, you can choose File → New → Saved Search and define a new search. This option allows you to create a saved search that includes subfolders and runs across multiple accounts. No matter which way you choose to create a smart folder, you can always modify its search criteria by right-clicking on it and selecting the Folder Properties item.

Although Thunderbird is a rather capable email client, it doesn’t mean it has all the features you will ever need. However, as with Firefox, you can extend Thunderbird’s functionality by installing extensions. Here are a couple of extensions that you might find useful.

The XNotes extension allows you to attach sticky notes to messages. It may not sound like much, but XNotes can come in rather handy when you need to annotate individual messages. Once you’ve added a note to a message, XNotes automatically tags it, so you can easily find it later.

Quotecollapse is another nifty extension that collapses quotes in the message body. This may not sound like much, but Quotecollapse makes it easier to read messages and add in-line replies. Install Quotecollapse, restart Thunderbird, and the quotes in every message will be collapsed. To expand a quote, click on the tiny Plus icon next to the quote. Better yet, QuoteCollapse plays nicely with the Quote Colors extension that can apply colors and borders to each quote level and nesting quotes.

As the name suggests, the Contact Sidebar extension adds an address book sidebar that allows you to switch between different address books, search for contacts, create new cards, and so on. Once the extension is installed, you can show and hide the Contacts Sidebar using the F4 key. But that’s not all. The Contacts Sidebar allows you to quickly search your address book, write a message to selected contacts, send contacts as a vCard attachment, and much more.

The ImportExportTools extension is an indispensable tool for moving messages in or out of Thunderbird. It supports the following export/import operations:

• export a folder and subfolders into a single file in the mbox format
• export all messages as individual eml files
• export all messages in individual html or plain text files with an index
• import messages in the eml format
• import a directory containing eml files

By default, Thunderbird doesn’t have a calendar, and it lacks the ability to synchronize data between multiple clients. However, the Lightning plug-in combined with the Sync Kolab extension can fill the void. While Sync Kolab is designed for use with a Kolab server (hence its name), it works like a charm with a plain IMAP account as well. Most email services out there provide support for IMAP, so you can use your email account to store Sync Kolab’s data. However, it’s a good idea to set up a separate email account for use with SyncKolab only.

Figure 3: The Sync Kolab configuration wizard guides you through the setup process

Download and install the Lightning and SyncKolab plug-ins, then create three folders – Calendar, Tasks, and Contacts – on your IMAP server. To configure SyncKolab’s preferences, choose Tools → SyncKolab options. This starts a wizard that guides you through the process of setting up a synchronization profile. All you have to do is to give the profile a name and select the appropriate folders for each data type: Calendar for the Lightning events, Tasks for Todos, and Contacts for the Address Book. Make sure that both the Save to IMAP folder and Sync [Calendar/Tasks/Contacts] check boxes are ticked. Once you’ve configured the profile, you have to add the SyncKolab button to Thunderbird’s toolbar. Right-click somewhere on Thunderbird’s toolbar and select Customize. Drag the Sync Kolab button onto the toolbar and press Done. To start synchronization, click on the Sync Kolab button. Alternatively, you can set Sync Kolab to perform synchronization at predefined time intervals. To do this, choose Tools → SyncKolab options, select the profile in the left pane and enter the desired value in the Sync interval field.

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As you can see, mastering Thunderbird is not that difficult after all. All you need is a couple of extensions and a day or two to get to grips with Thunderbird’s advanced features. Once you’ve done that, you can deservedly call yourself an email productivity guru.

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