Thunderbird is not quite as downloaded as Firefox these days, but it is a good start to what hopefully will become a powerful email client.

In my daily use, I’ve tried many extensions and uninstalled most. However, here are 8 that I love:

• Lightning - Having a calendar right in your email client makes it easy to see your schedule and what you’ve got to get done. Plus it brings along the ability to accept Outlook meeting requests which is needed in a corporate environment.
• Provider - What’s better than a calendar? Well a calendar that synchronizes back and fourth with Google Calendar. And for free!

I decided the other day that I wanted a new, cool Growl notification style for when I receive new email in Thunderbird. Instead of creating a Thunderbird specific one, I decided to create a generic one for email.

GotMail is the Growl notification style that I came up with. It’s simple in nature, but does have a bit of added flair at the bottom as a plain black box didn’t suit my needs.

The background of GotMail comes from BittBox.com and the email icon comes from Jonas Rask Design. Thanks to those that make graphics and give them away for free.

On the Mac, there are some fantastic applications that are completely free. Here is a list of what I believe to be some of the best I’ve found so far.

• Adium - The all in one, completely customizable instant messaging program. It absolutely rocks!
• AOL Radio - I love this because I can get nearly commercial free streaming music from all genres.
• AppFresh* - Only free while in development, AppFresh keeps me up-to-date on what installed programs are not up-to-date.
• Butler - Applications & Folders in the menu bar are so handy. Plus it can do so much more.

Today, the folks over at Growl released official extensions for both Thunderbird and Firefox. You can now be alerted when new mail arrives or when downloads complete.

Hosted on Zooomr

Install is extremely simple, just install the extension. That’s it. You can configure how it displays though the main Growl system preference just like any other application. It’s simple and sweet. I’ve been using them both all day and they are a great addition to the Mac platform.

Get Growl for Thunderbird or Firefox!

To go along with Tinseltown, my Firefox Christmas Theme, I created Present for Growl. Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X: it allows applications that support Growl to send you little pop-up notifications.

I had always wanted to create a Growl notification and found out that they are quite simple. I took my first stab at at creating one and it’s called Present.

Now, Present didn’t work well if you got a lot of text in your notification. So, I have coded it to hide any text bigger than the present box to avoid any overflow ugliness. I think quite a few notifications already do this so it shouldn’t be to big of an issue.