I spent a good chunk of yesterday doing a clean install of a new operating system on my computer (Fedora 7, in case you’re interested). As I was reinstalling software, files, and so forth, I stumbled across two handy add-ons. Perhaps these are old news to everyone else, but I hadn’t seen them before. So, in case any of you Firefox and Thunderbird users haven’t encountered them before, here they are:
1) Adblock Plus for Firefox. I’ve been using an ad-blocking extension in Firefox for a few years now, but I always had to create another filter whenever I encountered a new ad source. With Adblock Plus you can get a filter subscription that will block most ads you’re likely encounter online. Best of all, it blocks them before even downloading them (unlike some ad blockers that still use up the bandwidth to download all those large banners and images only to not display them). Installation is easy and takes less then a minute.
2) ImportExportTools for Thunderbird. The name is not the most elegant ever, but I suppose it does say what the extension is about. Basically, it gives you a lot more options in Thunderbird for importing and exporting mail. Notably, it gives you context menus in the folder pane with the export options. But what I think is coolest of all is that it gives you the option of exporting your messages in html format with an index file. I think this is a great way of archiving messages, since html is a standard format that you can read on pretty much every computer (i.e., no need to worry that on your next computer you won’t have an email client installed that can actually read your archived messages). Plus, html files don’t take up much space. Again, it’s an easy install that you can do in less than a minute.
Sydney
Alan Schmierer