Rated 4 out of 5 stars

by Hodor on Oct. 10, 2017 · permalink

I was looking for a way to make Thunderbird actually show the e-mail address of who sent a message when viewing a message list. Thunderbird only does this if a) there's no entry for the address in your address book and b) if the address doesn't have a "personal name" associated with it. Since most e-mails are now sent out in the "Name" <email-addres> format, the "From" column in message list view is pretty useless. And it makes it great for phishing attacks.

This add-on comes with some custom columns already configured: BCC, CC, Content-Base, X-Spam-Score, and X-Original-From. But! They will not be visible nor accessible from message list view until you actually enable them in ColumnsWizard.

(You do that by clicking the ColumnsWizard toolbar button, then click the Custom Columns tab and check off the columns you want to enable).

Once enabled, whatever custom columns you've set-up become *available* for message list view. Like any of the stock columns, you can enable or disable them, sort by them, size them and position them.

Adding a custom column is pretty simple. You just specify an ID (a unique string of your own choosing), the actual mail header for the column (Such as replyTo, Sender, etc) and the display name and tooltip for the column. Then you just enable it.

I setup one for "Sender" and it works great. The previous one-star review saying it doesn't probably didn't look at the docs or go through the config.

Minor issues:
1) It looks like custom columns, unlike stock columns, will not remember their size between Thunderbird sessions. Positioning does stay though.
2) A custom column can only map to one mail header. Which is generally fine, but some mail clients and servers provide useful information under more than one header (Both "Sender:" and "X-Sender:" are used for the original sender address, for example). If there was a way to map multiple headers to a column and give them a priority, that'd be useful. But that's not a deal-breaker for me.

Other nice feartures of this addon include being able to specify the default columns layout for message view for any new folders you create, some extra columns for Conversation view, the ability to enable mail header editing, and the ability to reset columns to the ColumnsWizard default you've setup.

Overall, very nice add-on that does what I want and more. Cheers to the author!