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Getting the Most Out of Your Applications: Part 2 Mozilla Thunderbird

Turn Thunderbird into an Organizational and Communication Powerhouse

Goal: Take Mozilla’s Thunderbird and turn it into the digital secretary that you have always wanted.
If you don’t like (or want to pay for) Microsoft Outlook, you can still have a powerful, feature-packed communication / information organizer. Mozilla’s Thunderbird is a program that handles basic email needs superbly. While it’s pretty basic to start, it can be extended to do just about everything that Outlook can do, along with a few things Outlook can’t.
To replace Microsoft Outlook, you’ll need the big three features: Email, Contacts, and Calendaring.

We’ll do the following things with these features:

Email – Thunderbird does a great job of handling email, but you can tweak it into an email juggernaut by doing the following:

• Combine Outlook’s folders with Gmail’s tags
• Search the full text of your emails with the power of Google
• Spell check and look up definitions of email text
• Automatically zip file attachments to shrink email size
• Create emails and schedule when they are automatically sent

Contacts – Thunderbird handles contacts, but they’re not integrated as seamlessly as Outlook’s. Until you do the following:

• Set up an integrated Address Book that can be used for emails, calendar appointments, and more
• Sync your Contacts with web services like Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, and more

Calendar – Thunderbird does not come with a built in calendar, but we’

• Install an integrated calendar
• Sync your calendar with web services like Google Calendar, Yahoo, and more
• View and share online calendars from your friends and popular web services

Let’s do some customizing.