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Several posts have made the round in the last weeks that explained how a specific webmail service could be selected as the default client when the user would click on a mailto link on a website. One article that can be seen as an example would be my How To Make Gmail The Default Mail Client article that I wrote last week.

I already covered how one could make Gmail the default Firefox 3 mail client which would have the effect that mailto links would be opened directly in Gmail. This did not change the default mail behavior in Windows however which was not a huge problem for me because I use Thunderbird locally and the Gmail account is available in the mail program.

If you regularly send information to friends or colleagues you might find the Email This extension for Firefox quite handy. Normally those information are copied and then pasted into the email program or online script and then send to the recipients which naturally means that the sender has to open a website or application manually to send the information.

I only glimpsed over the Lifehacker article in the Brief Firefox add-on and only the mail from Dark Kosmos made me change my mind. Google has added a very interesting feature to Gmail called Labs which is accessible in the account options. Labs is basically a testing ground for Gmail add-ons that are not yet ready for prime time. You can be sure that most will work without difficulties though but Google does not want to take any chances.

When I starting using Gmail I was surprised that the service would not make use of a secure connection between my computer and the service which was a pressing matter because I was using several other Google services that were requiring https to connect. It felt strange and out of place that Gmail did not require https.

The email client Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 has been released just a few hours ago and is now available for download on the official Get Thunderbird website but also through automatic updates in the mail client. I had to manually selected Help > Check for Updates to install the new version this way but most users will probably be notified about the update in Thunderbird.

Mailbox Alert (via Genbeta) is a add-on for the popular mail client Thunderbird that adds the ability to define alerts for mail folders in Thunderbird. Alerts can be messages, sounds or commands. The default functionality in Thunderbird allows to define one sound or notification that will be displayed when new mail arrives which does include spam mail.

A new version of Gmail was introduced a while ago by Google which added several new features, like color labels, to Gmail. So called Gmail 2 is accessible through a link in the upper right corner of the Gmail interface. A click on Newer Version loads the new interface. Apparently though this link is not available for Opera 9.5 users. I’m not sure if it is available for Opera 9.27 users, if anyone could let me know it would be nice.

If you use both the email client Mozilla Thunderbird and Google Mail (Gmail) you might need a way to keep both address books in sync so that they can be accessed from both software programs. It’s unfortunately not that easy to synchronize the address books with the default options at hand.