HelpSpa » Thunderbird

How to Add an Email Signature in Thunderbird 3

David W — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 20:29:35 +0000

Adding a signature to your emails in Thunderbird used to be a pain in the neck. Thunderbird 3 makes it easy, and here’s how to do it:

1. Navigate to the Tools > Account Settings dialogue box.

2. In the Account Settings dialogue box, find the account you want to write a signature for (if you have only one account then your choice is easy) and click on the name of the account (in this example I clicked on “test@somewhere.com”).

On the right panel, about halfway down, you will see a “Signature text” box. You can click the button to “use HTML” if you wish, but either way you can go ahead and enter you signature text in this box. When you are done entering the email signature text press “OK” and you’re all set.

Note if you want to create different signatures for different email accounts in Thunderbird, simply repeat the above process for each account you have configured.

Thunderbird – How to Make Email Reply Above or Before Quoted Text

David W — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 22:05:46 +0000

Depending upon how you like to reply to emails, you may want to have your reply to an email come above quoted text. For those of you who don’t use quoted text, quoted text is a feature whereby when you reply to an email, the email program automatically includes the text from the email you are replying to. It’s very helpful — especially when you are working with someone and there are multiple emails going back-and-forth.

Once you have quoted text, however, the next question is where are you going to reply — are you going to reply BEFORE (or on top of the quoted text) or are you going to reply AFTER (or below) the quoted text. I’ve always set my clients to reply to email BEFORE the quoted text, as I find it easier for people to see. Further, when people reply AFTER the quoted text — especially in an email where you’ve had multiple replies in a single email and thus a long trail of text — it’s often hard to find the newest reply, and some people don’t think to look below all of the quoted text to find your reply.

When I installed the new Thunderbird (that is, Thunderbird 5.0), I found that the program defaulted to having my replies come AFTER the quoted text. As this is not my preferred way to handle replies, I needed to reset the feature so my replies cam BEFORE the quoted text. Here’s how to do that:

1. Go to Tools -> Account Settings (not “options” where you think the switch might be located):

Thunderbird 5.0 Account Settings in Tools Menu

2. Now in the Account Settings panel, click the “Composition & Addressing” option under the account you want to modify (note in my example I have two email accounts and I’ve clearly changed the names for the screenshot):

Thunderbird Account Settings Options

Under the “Automatically quote the original message when replying” item (of course, make sure it’s checked so you include quotes in your reply) you can use the “Then,” drop-down box to decide if you want your reply to start after or above the quote (as shown here). or after the quote (not shown).

Once you’ve made your selection, click “Ok” at the bottom to save your modifications. You may have to restart Thunderbird to see the changes in effect.

you can then decide where you want the quote to be and where you want your signature to be, as well.

How to Restore the Email Preview Pane in Thunderbird

David W — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 21:16:40 +0000

When I browse through my emails in Thunderbird I like to be able to quickly scroll through previews of the messages. But every one in a while the “email preview” disappears.

To get the email preview pane back in Thunderbird simply:

1. Go to View ->Layout ->Message Pane

and your email preview will be back.

Restore the Message Pane in Thunderbird

(You could also just hit the F8 function key to do the same thing.)

Send Thunderbird Email as HTML Only

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:07:47 +0000

I stopped using Outlook and started using Thunderbird many years ago, and have never looked back. One of my favorite features of Thunderbird was the on-the-fly ability to choose whether I wanted to send an email in plain text, html only, or a combination of the two. For a long time I liked the idea of being able to select how to send emails, as I knew that certain people couldn’t read HTML emails.

But now that almost everyone uses a GUI-type email or webmail service that can easily view HTML, I decided it was time to change and now send all of my emails as HTML. Here’s how it’s done:

1. In Thunderbird go to Tools>Options.

2. Head to the bottom right of the new dialog box that opens and select Send Options.

3. Finally at the top of the screen under Text Format, select “Send the message in HTML anyway”.

That’s it.