Solution Wanted!

In one of my previous posts I wrote about the Junk folder issue in Thunderbird. Fortunately, a simple solution was found soon that made the problem almost negligeable. Today, I am going to rant about Thunderbird once again. This time, it will be the signature functionality that we will review with scrutiny.

As you know, email signatures are those lines that contain your titles and contact information and which are somehow inserted by your mail client at the end of every message you compose. Now here is the tricky part. If you’ve never created a signature in Thunderbird, when you finally get around to doing that, you’ll be in for a big surprise: how theo heck do you do it?

If you are like me, finding the place to enter your signature string is not going to be easy. To save you the time and effort, I came forward with this handy screenshot that shows exactly where the signature setting is located.

Now, note the File Chooser button: is this how you would expect to put in a couple lines of text? Why mess with the file system? It is just plain ugly! You just want your signature to be silently stored somewhere under your profile, so it is easy to backup and move around.

When I ran into this, um, feature, I knew right away that I was not going to do it the Thunderbird way. Instead, I turned to Google for clues, and sure enough, it had some. Thanks to Thunderbird’s plugin architecture, there are lots of helpful extensions out there that fill the gaps left over by the Mozilla developers. Not surprisingly, there are a few that deal with the less than perfect native Thunderbird signatures. After spending some time playing around with these extensions, I am now ready to pronounce the winner. It is… Quicktext by the Swedish developer Emil Hesslow aka WizKid.

After you install the plugin, you are free to create all kinds of signatures and other inserts for future use in your messages. You can organize them the way you like, attach hot keys, and otherwise customize the plugin. Heck, you can even use variables like [[SUBJECT]] and [[TO=email]] in your templates.

And guess where Quicktext stores your settings? Right, precisely where they belong: under your profile — something that the original Thunderbird developers could not have figured out. But it doesn’t matter anymore, now that we have this excellent extension. Hope you like it as much as I do!