thunderbird extensions

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Quickly Enable or Disable HTML Messages In Thunderbird

One of my security and privacy recommendations for desktop email users is to disable HTML emails. This basically turns every email that you receive into a plain text email that does not load anything from third party servers. Once in a while though you may stumble upon an email that you need or want to view in HTML. If you have disabled HTML you’d have to enable it again by going to View > Message Body As > Original HTML or Simple HTML to do that. And once you have finished reading the message, you need to perform the very same steps to disable HTML for all emails again.

Sebastian recommended the HTML Temp add-on for the Thunderbird email client to switch HTML messages in Thunderbird on or off more effortlessly.

Download HTML Temp from the official Thunderbird add-ons repository. Once it has been downloaded open up the email client and click on Tools > Add-ons to open the add-ons manager. Click on the options icon on the left of the search all add-ons form there and select Install Add-on from file from the context menu.

Select the downloaded add-on on your local computer and install it in the email program. You need to restart Thunderbird before it becomes available.

The add-on adds the current message display preference in the lower right corner of the status bar. You can now right-click on it to switch to Simple HTML or Original HTML whenever you need to view a message in HTML. Once you are done you use the same method to switch back to plain text messages.

The add-on allows you to move a button with the same functionality to one of the toolbars. This can be helpful if you have disabled the status bar in the program or prefer to click on the button in the header area of the email client.

Update: Sebastian mentioned that the toolbar button behaves different from the status bar button. When you click the toolbar button HTML will be enabled only for the active email and no other. This means that you do not have to click again to restore the plain text message view.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Use BCC Instead For Thunderbird For Better Email Privacy

When it comes to sending emails to multiple recipients you have several options at your disposal. The most common options are to use To, CC or BCC for that. The first two options may cause a privacy issue as they reveals all recipient’s email addresses to all recipients. That may not be a problem if you are sending out emails in a company or organization but may very well be one if recipients do not have anything to do with each other. One example where this could be a problem are the giveaways that I hold here on Ghacks regularly. I usually have to email ten or even more winners of licenses and it would not really make sense to let everyone see each others email addresses in the those emails.

Use BCC Instead is a Mozilla Thunderbird extension. It works almost like the native attachment warnings that you get when you use words like attached in the email body or subject without attaching a file to the email.

The extension warns you whenever you send emails to multiple recipients using either To or CC instead of BCC.

use bcc instead

Please note that the extension warns you about sending the email to multiple To or CC recipients. It gives you the option to go ahead and send it anyway or to click cancel to modify the parameters to BCC. It does not auto-correct the issue.

The default limit is set to 10, which means that you only get warnings if you send out emails to more than ten recipients using To or CC. You can change that in the options, for instance to 1 which would always warn you when To or CC is used.

thunderbird extension