Last week Amy introduced the Mozilla Thunderbird-based email client Postbox. I’ve been a Postbox user for years, ever since it was a free beta project. I came to rely on Postbox so much that I gladly paid for it when Postbox was officially released.
In addition to the features Amy mentioned—like Postbox’s seamless integration with Gmail and its plethora of keyboard shortcuts (press V to quickly move a message into a folder!)—I also appreciate Postbox’s powerful search functions.
As Amy explained, Postbox also works with extensions. I wanted to highlight a few of the add-ons I have found to be especially useful:
- The combination of Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar enables two-way sync with all of your Google calendars.
- Zindus syncs your Postbox contacts with your Google/Gmail contacts.
- Quicktext creates smart email templates, allowing you to send personalized (yet canned) responses with just a few keystrokes. (This extension is great for those times you find yourself sending the same email to different students again and again.)
- And finally, for the back-up aficionados that I know all ProfHacker readers have become, there’s ImportExportTools, which makes it easy to backup thousands of email messages. Don’t rely on Gmail to preserve your messages forever; connect Postbox to Gmail, and then save your entire inbox to your hard drive!
I know many people chafe at the idea of paying for software when there are free alternatives available. However, I personally don’t mind paying what amounts to the cost of several pizzas for software that works well and is frequently updated—especially when it’s software that I use every day. More than that: nearly every hour of every day!
Have you found some add-ons to be particularly valuable for Postbox or its close cousin Thunderbird?
[Image courtesy of Flickr user Nomadic Lass / Creative Commons Licensed]
