Want Thunderbird 5 to be more like Outlook? Try Lightning

Mozilla Thunderbird is a great cross platform email, newsgroup and RSS reader that's very configurable and open source. It lacks very little in these areas, but anyone used to Microsoft Outlook might well want to add in task list management and calendar features. Lightning is a free, open-source plugin that provides these features.

Lightning 1.0b5 has just been released, making the plugin compatible with both Thunderbird 5 Final and Thunderbird 6 Beta as well as fixing a number of problems reported with non-working calendars and disappearing alarms.

To install Lightning, open Thunderbird, choose Tools > Add-ons and enter Lightning into the search bar. Click Install next to the Lightning entry and wait for it to download and install. Restart Thunderbird to start using Lightning. You'll find a Calendar tab in Thunderbird where you can add and manage events and tasks.

You can subscribe to online calendars that are published in ICS format. Under the list of calendars, right click and choose New Calendar. Select on the Network and click Next. Choose ICS format and then enter the full address of the ICS calendar. Click Next, provide a calendar name and select a color to display this calendar's events and click Finish.

Click the Task icon to view your task list. Choose New Task to add a new one. Enter a title and location for the task. Select Due Date and provide a date and time for its deadline. You can add repetition to any task with a frequency of daily, weekly, monthy or yearly. You can also add notes in the description and select a reminder time. You can tick off tasks as they're completed and also set their priority as high, low or medium.

Add Calendar events in a similar way to tasks. Open the calendar tab, right click and choose New Event. Enter the event information in the pop up window in the same way as for a new task. You can click and drag events around the calendar to change the date and time that they occur. Double click an existing event to edit it.

Lightning 1.0b5 is a free, open-source plugin for Mozilla Thunderbird or SeaMonkey that works on Windows, Mac and Linux.