Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Thunderbird: Bounce and Growl

The beauty of an application with a plug-in architecture is that you can add features that you want. Mail redirect (or bounce) can be added to Thunderbird with the Mail Redirect add-on. Cool! Read the comments for a URL to a version that works with Thunderbird 2, or for the way to fix it yourself (it works, but you have to tell the maxVersion check). Now I have an easy way to bounce messages to Gmail for search archiving.

So that just leaves Growl telling me about new messages in Thunderbird. I found three ways to do that. The first, yamb + growlNotify.sh, is what I've been using since I started using Thunderbird 2.0b1 (I was an early adopter because I love IMAP mail tags). I don't like it because Thunderbird is always bouncing in my dock to tell me that a folder (who knows which one) is being processed and can't be accessed right now. I don't care, but the bounces are distracting, so while Growl fits GTD, the extraneous bounces don't. The good news is that what I was using before, Growl New Message Notification, now works with Thunderbird 2! This is the best route in my mind. It's one add-on (not an add-on and a shell script) (although you do need to install growlnotify, one of the optional Growl Extras installs), it's very configurable (so are shell scripts, but not as easily), and it doesn't give me the error messages that YAMB does. However, if you want another choice, there's also Growl Notifications for Firefox (completed downloads) and Thunderbird (new messages) in the sandbox. I prefer the extension not in the sandbox because it has options, but they both work.

Tags are good. Plug-ins are good.

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