How-To: Replace Outlook with Thunderbird the Right Way
Essential Add-ons:
1. Lightning - a.k.a. Mozilla’s Calendar Project and Provider for Google Calendar
The most essential missing piece in Thunderbird is a fully functional calendar. Lightning is a better calendar than Outlook’s calendar because it natively handles iCal compliant web calendars. Combined with Google Calendar and the Provider for Google Calendar extension, this will enable two-way calendar synchronization between your computer and Google Calendar. But, the really useful part is that you can now easily synchronize your calendar across several computers, and through Goosync, most mobile devices for free.
2. Goosync
The free version will allow you to synchronize the calendar on your mobile device to a single Google calendar within a 30-day window. The paid subscription allows multiple calendars and the window synchronizes up to 1 year in advance. Goosync only works over the air and you will need a data plan with your wireless provider.
3. Mbox Import/Export Tools
Thunderbird can import your Outlook e-mail natively, but oddly enough, it does not export e-mail. Now, a true Kool-Aid drinker wouldn’t care that you are quietly locked into another platform. It’s not really a lock-in because Thunderbird stores e-mail in a plain text mbox file. But, the savvy user will recognize that it is still a pain to move a plain mbox into another system. The beauty of this extension is that it will export each e-mail as a separate .eml file. And, it will compile a HTML index to make your e-mail searchable without an e-mail client.
This feature is critical if you ever want to use Thunderbird in an office environment. Your co-workers will likely need to access your e-mail at some point during your employment. So you must have some way to get your e-mail out of Thunderbird and into another e-mail client with a minimum amount of friction. Forwarding a hundred megs of e-mail is not an option!
4. Winmail.dat Reader
Rich Text Formatted (RTF) e-mail sent by Outlook is generally unreadable by anything other than Outlook. Instead of a nicely formatted e-mail, you get a blank e-mail with a winmail.dat attachment. Instead of complaining to the sender, just open the winmail.dat in this reader. You can then export the contents into human readable e-mail.
Nice-To-Have Extensions:
1. Quickfile
If there is a single feature that will keep me from switching to anything else it is Quickfile. Move e-mail o any folder by hitting Ctrl+Q and typing the folder name. It doesn’t even have to be the complete name of the folder, Quickfile will auto-complete the folder name. If you want to create a new folder on the fly, Quickfile will automatically create the new folder too.
2. WebMail
Here is an extension that will download your webmail even if the webmail provider does not provide POP or IMAP access. This means you can stop paying for Hotmail or Yahoo Mail POP accounts. The WebMail extension acts as a proxy and downloads the webmail as though it were a POP or IMAP server.
3. Minimize to Tray & Minimize to Tray Enhancer
Need to free up some space on the Taskbar? Minimize Thunderbird to the System Tray instead. It will display an icon in the System Tray when new mail arrives so you can reclaim that Taskbar real-estate.
4. Remove Duplicate Messages (Alternate)
Let’s say you have imported e-mail from several computers and dumped them all into a single folder. Now let’s say you have to consolidate them and remove the duplicates before exporting the folder. You could go through them all by hand and match dates and file sizes, or you could just let this extension do it for you.
Make sure you install the (Alternate) version for TB 2.0+, the standard version only works on TB 1.5-.
5. MozBackup
Backup your Thunderbird (and Firefox) profiles because reinstalling each an every one of the above extensions by hand sucks.
