My colleague Jason has written extensively about Firefox extensions, but what if you use that other jewel in Mozilla’s crown: Thunderbird? Read on to learn about my favorite add-ons.

Before I start, here’s how to install extensions within Thunderbird. Firstly, if you’re downloading the extension via Firefox, don’t directly click the download link. This will cause Firefox to try and install the extension itself. Instead, right-click and Save As. Within Thunderbird, click Tools -> Extensions and then click the Install button. Then navigate to the .xpi file. Thunderbird will need to restart after each extension has been installed.

Spamato: Around two thirds of my daily email is spam. This is pretty chronic but I guess I have it good compared to others. Thunderbird has a built-in Bayesian filter but it’s never been too hot for me. It’s particularly bad at detecting those “stock pumper” emails that are one large image file. Enter Spamato. This uses just about every detection trick in the book, from familiar Bayesian filtering to collaborative comparison. It’s very effective. Downloading the weekend’s email this morning, Spamato caught around 60 spam mails and missed only six. I expect this will get better the more I train Spamato because I only started using it last week. Note: You need to have the Java Runtime installed to use Spamato.

Grab and Drag: This one will work in both Firefox and Thunderbird. It simply lets you click and drag anywhere on the webpage/email to scroll, just like you can in Adobe Acrobat reader. For some reason I find this useful when reading longer emails. Maybe it’s the fact that the scrolling is perfectly smooth, rather than stepped, as with a mouse wheel. During the setup you can define a key to temporarily turn off the grabber in order to select text (I use Ctrl). Note that once the extension is installed and Thunderbird has been reset, you’ll need to activate Grab and Drag by clicking its entry on the Tools menu.

URL Link: This is genius. Ever got annoyed when you receive a plain-text email with a URL that’s split across several lines? Copying and pasting each separate line into your browser’s URL bar is time consuming. Once this extension is installed, you can simply highlight the whole URL, right-click and select Open Selected URL. The whole lot will then be pasted into your browser’s address bar. This extension works in both Firefox and Thunderbird—within Firefox it can be useful for visiting URLs you uncover in mailing list archives and the like.

If you know of any cool Thunderbird extensions, add them to the comments of this posting.