Inspired by the Gmail style conversation view this add-on for Thunderbird gives a conversation style view for reading and replying to messages inside the Thunderbird message reader.

Features

• a conversation view that fetches all related messages in all folders,
• inline reply, to quickly reply to an email thread in a streamlined, efficient way (with contacts autocomplete!),
• contact tooltips, with their avatars and links to their various social network profiles if you have “Contacts for Thunderbird” installed,
• a quote detection code that collapses most types of quotations,
• integration with various 3rd-party extensions such as BidiUI or Enigmail,
• partial Bugzilla email threads support,
• and other bonus features.

Thunderbird Conversations from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.

Instructions

• Install Thunderbird Conversations
• [Optional] Conversations works better when the Contacts for Thunderbird add-on is also installed

Known Issues and differences

• The new “Between” column is wrongly positioned on startup. You will have to drag-and-drop the column header to put it in the right position.
• There’s no way to send receipt notifications, a workaround is to hit “more” > “view this message using the classic reader”.
• Extensions that extend the regular message reader won’t work, because we’re replacing the old message reader: I’m thinking about the Bugzilla helper for instance; however, we have a hook mechanism if these extensions wish to be compatible with us (see hook.js and enigmail.js for an example).
• The initial setup might take a very long time. You can close the window and open Tools > Activity Manager to follow the progress of reindexing.
• Mail that just arrived might take forever to display. The workaround is to click on another email thread, and then switch back to the message you wanted to read.
• Each time you click on a new email, a Gloda query is run in the background, so you should expect a slight performance hit.

Feedback: post a message in the mozilla-labs google group
Reviews and Comments: addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/thunderbird-conversations
Source Code: github.com/protz/GMail-Conversation-View
Issues: github.com/protz/GMail-Conversation-View/issues