I spent some time fiddling with Thunderbird this weekend, spurned on mostly by this article: entropic principal: Using Thunderbird to Get Things Done. I’ve been having an email management problem for a while now and thought this might do the trick.

So I set up some saved-search folders like the site recommended. I had played around with those a little before and was pleasantly surprised by the performance. I was quckly frustrated with assigning labels though. It was taking 2 keystrokes and that’s just not acceptable! So I downloaded the keyconfig extension and remapped some keys to apply the label and move to the next unread message in one shot. Now I can really plow through my inbox.

I also downloaded 2 other extensions I hadn’t known about. One, Mail Redirect adds the much needed “bounce” feature to Thunderbird. I forward a fair amount of feedback to other departments, and it was probably the last feature from Pine that I really missed. (The other was the ability to file messages using just the keyboard, but that was fixed with Quick File).

The other handy utility which I finally found was the ability to sync my address book between work and home. It uses Plaxo as the intermediary so I had to sign up for yet another free web account, but I had been looking for this for weeks, and it works seemlessly. Plaxo 1.62 (Beta)