I find there are two extensions that I install for Thunderbird every time I set up a new computer. The first is Plaxo for Thunderbird, which does a pretty good job at syncing contacts. The second is Messagefaces with Gravatar support turned on, which you can find in Add-ons > Options > Online Services. (Wish it was on by default, it doesn’t really work without it.) Plaxo has an avatar feature but I turn it off because way more people have Gravatars than Plaxo avatars.
I tend to dislike Plaxo for the amount of spam is causes. Working at a business we have a few customers we get Plaxo (please update your information) emails constantly.
As for Message faces, it looks like I’d have to wait till they come out with a Thunderbird 3.0 compatible version.
The one extension I always install is the “Auto Zip” Extension. Sending files all the time its nice to click a button to collect and compress them all before sending.
Do you know of any good Thunderbird extensions for generating email stats?
I’m suffering from “Web 2.0” fatigue, is Plaxo worth signing up for? Or is it just another username/password to add to the list?
Awesome! I never knew this add-on existed. This will definitely help me recognize some of the folks that email me a little easier.
Wow that is cool. I just installed it. Works great!
Very useful,I have installed it , perfect
Wayne,
I personally do not like Plaxo because it tends to control too much. In the ideal world everybody updates their contact and makes everything up to date, but in reality many the information on Plaxo’s db (at least in my network) is not the most updated.
It takes a lot of effort to organise an address book and keep it up to date, and i seriously don’t thing anything can match manually adding or changing numbers.
Looks good, another add-on I like is smartSave, backs up emails so they are searchable on the harddrive.
Please don’t recommend Plaxo. Most people I know consider the emails sent out by Plaxo as spam. This made me stop using it.
Gravatar support for email clients on the other hand is great!
— frankps
For MessageFace, be sure to read the comment (at Mozilla) by “dougw”
Yeah, I’ve been using the MessageFaces plugin for quite a while now. It’s great seeing everybody’s Gravatars when I’m reading through the wordpress mailing lists š
Nice plugins, thanks!
Thanks, Matt, the MessageFaces is fun and maybe even useful. I guess I could get tired of it soon though, because I don’t have that many Gravatar users in my correspondence.
For what it’s worth, I will list a few Thunderbird add-ons I’ve found useful (w/o links to avoid Akismet, sry).
– Contacts Sidebar
– Duplicate Contact Manager
– Header Scroll
– Quote Colors
– Xpunge
I disliked Plaxo and prefer to sync contacts with my Google account using the Zindus extension.
Plaxo has a bad name from the past, where they did indeed spam you silly. As far as I know, they stopped doing that a long time ago, and I sure don’t get any spam from them, nor any “this contact has changed” mails.
Maybe that’s because I’m using it myself, I don’t know. Never got complaints about it from other people though.
Anyone using contact lists on their computer, no matter how safe they seem to be, are ignored by me at all costs when it comes to handing out personal information. I’ll usually give them my hotmail spam-to address, which I never look at anyways, and then forget about them. People still don’t realize that such lists can do more harm than good. Companies or not… it’s sad really.