Windows/Mac/Linux (Thunderbird): Harness the to-do-managing power of Remember the Milk from inside your mail reader with an alpha extension for Thunderbird. Once installed and authenticated with your RTM account, the task manager provided by the Lightning extension will have bi-directional access to your tasks, which you can add, delete, modify, and prioritise from inside your mail manager. Hit the video above to see a few of the things you can do with the extension, and hit the via link below for step-by-step installation instructions. Remember the Milk Provider extension is a free download, but requires a free Mozilla Add-Ons account to download, needs the Lightning calendar extension, and works wherever Thunderbird does.

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Thunderbird only (all platforms): Thunderbird extension Contacts Sidebar pulls Thunderbird's built-in contact management out of obscurity, making it more usable and accessible. After installing, just hit F4 at any time to toggle Contacts Sidebar's visibility in the Thunderbird sidebar. Once visible, you can easily search, edit, or email contacts from the main Thunderbird interface. We'd mentioned Contacts Sidebar once before among our eight killer Thunderbird extensions, but in light of today's Hive Five contact managers and the 'bird's relatively poor showing, it deserves a mention of its own.

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The first message one could consider email was sent more than 30 years ago, and that's probably when people began associating angst and uncertainty with the words "Inbox" and "unread messages." The tools available to read and send emails have advanced considerably since then, but what you actually do with all that chatter, without eating up entire days of work time, is up to you. Luckily, we've covered a wealth of filtering and processing methods and software tweaks that make email less stressful and time-consuming over the years, and a list of our top 10 productive email boosters is after the jump.

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Thunderbird only: Thunderbird extension Seek adds advanced search and sort functionality to the open source email client, Thunderbird, through a feature called faceted browsing. As you can see in the screencast above, faceted browsing narrows down emails by a number of conditions, introducing tonnes of useful ways to slice and dice your inbox to find exactly what you want. Add to that the timeline feature, which looks like a blast along with being useful, and we've got a pretty worthwhile Thunderbird extension here. If you give it a go, let's hear what you think in the comments.

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Windows/Linux (Thunderbird): Import Outlook's PST files and choose which email folders to bring into Thunderbird with PST Import, a free extension for the open-source, cross-platform email manager Thunderbird. While Thunderbird can import certain messages and settings from an existing Outlook installation, the PST Import add-on lets you set up email on Linux systems, and gives Thunderbird users the ability to pull specific email folders from a stand-alone PST file. The program was coded in France and one user review noted a dialog pop-up in French language, but the instructions should be fairly straight-forward, regardless. PST Import is a free download and is listed as working with Windows and Linux versions of Thunderbird—if any OS X users want to give it a quick shot, I'll update whether it works there too. Thanks Eddy!

Gmail's IMAP support roll-out this week had nerds all atwitter about the possibility of synchronised email access across devices, computers, and clients. IMAP is far superior to regular old POP for fetching your messages and maintaining your folder list whether you're on your iPhone, office or home computer. If IMAP's got you curious but you're not sure what desktop application to use with Gmail, consider the extensible, fast, cross-platform and free Mozilla Thunderbird, our beloved Firefox's little sibling. Here's how to get the full Gmail experience in Thunderbird with IMAP.

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All platforms: Add tasks, set appointments and keep on top of your schedule with Mozilla Sunbird and Lightning, the free calendar managers that function as a stand-alone client or extension to the Thunderbird e-mail program. Version 0.7 of Sunbird/Lightning touts a redesign of the user interface and task-adding dialog, along with user-requested functions like adding tasks in different timezones, more customizable recurring events and an improved "Today" glance panel. Sunbird and Lightning store information in a SQLite format, but can also work with iCal data or Google Calendar through an extension. Both are free downloads and work on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.