Saturday, April 23, 2011

Thunderbird 3.1

By Jitendra kumar sahoo

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Ever since Mozilla Thunderbird launched in December of 2004, it has become the email suite of choice for many of us.

Sync contacts across web accounts:

1. Download and install the ‘Zindus’ extension.

2. Now you will find the Zindus icon at the bottom of the mail page of the Thunderbird email client and you will also find the ‘Zindus’ option in the Tools Menu, find and open it.

3. For Google, click on the Add button and give it your username and password for the Gmail account you want to sync your contacts with. It doesn’t store the password in any web service.

4. Click on the Test Connection, and if everything seems well then click OK and then the Sync Now button.

5. You can do the same for the Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop, AOL and more.

Keyboard shortcuts:

Since you were the first one to learn HTML in your block, and love to show off your keyboard ninja skills, here are some shortcuts to add in your arsenal. Replace the [Ctrl] key with the [command] key and the [Alt] key with the [Options] key if you are on a Macintosh.

1. Send the Message or Mail Instantly: [Ctrl] + [Enter] (Or [Return]).

2. View the source of a Message: [Ctrl] + [U].

3. Hide Thunderbird Window from the screen: [Ctrl] +[H].

4. Access your address Book: [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [B].

5. Move to last Accessed Folder: [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [M].

6. Expand/Collapse all threads: \ and *.

7. Reply to all: [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [R].

8. Move to the search bar: [Ctrl] + [K].

Disable Global Indexer:

One of the most talked about features of the new and shiny Thunderbird 3 is its ability to search across your mails in all folders and whatever they are in hiding. The compromise is a slight extra CPU load, so if you don’t search your mail often and are speed freak, you can disable Global Search and Indexer. This can be done by opening the preference tab and navigating to the ‘Advanced’ tab. Once there, remove the check mark from the ‘Enable Global Search and Indexer’ option and click OK.

AutoHide TabBar:

If you want to save on some screen space by auto-hiding the tab bar when only one tab is open, you can follow the following steps:

1. Go to Preferences. In Linux installations, you will typically find them in the edit menu.

2. Navigate to the Advanced Tab and Click the ‘Config Editor’ button and click through the warning.

3. Find mail.tabs.autoHide and double-click it to switch the value to True.

4. Close the about:config and enjoy your extra bit screen estate.

Enable auto downloading of images inside an email:

Thunderbird because of privacy concerns doesn’t download the embedded images in a email by default, if you find this annoying and would like to change it, here is how you can do it. Access the Config Editor as explained in the step above. Seek mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image. And double-click on it to switch the value to True and close the about:config window. Please be careful while playing around with the about:config page.

Customising email archives:

The default archive behavior of Thunderbird is to archive your email based on year, now if you have lot of incoming traffic in your inbox, this can be problematic and Thunderbird doesn’t give you any explicit option to change it. To alter this download and install an extension known as Message Archive Options. Once installed and inside the settings page of the add-on you will see the option to add month wise archive function or if you so desire all your archives can even be dumped into a single folder. Enjoy those forwards for eternity now.

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