Add a calendar and task list to Thunderbird with Lightning

Mozilla Thunderbird is a very powerful email program but compared to Microsoft Outlook, it lacks any way of managing appointments. Lightning is an add-on that adds this extra feature, and it works very well with the new tabbed interface in Thunderbird.

Installation is simple and there are two ways to do so. The first is to visit the Lightning page from Mozilla Thunderbird and click on the download button and download the xpi file to your computer.

Start Thunderbird, click on the Tools menu and then Add-ons. Click on the gear icon at the top of the tab and then select Install add-on from file. Find the downloaded file and click on OK to install Lightning.

Alternatively it can be installed from within Thunderbird. Click on the Tools menu and then Add-ons. Click on Get Add-ons on the left hand side and type Lightning in the search box. Click on the green Add to Thunderbird button. Either way requires a restart of Thunderbird.

Lightning adds a couple of small icons next to the new tab icon at the top of the Thunderbird window, one for the calendar and the other for the todo list.

The calendar can display appointments by day, week, multiweek or month. Very importantly, it can display more than one calendar. This helps organise appointments between different projects (or just home and work, for example).

Calendars can also be imported from the internet if they are in iCal, CalDAV or Sun Java System Calendar formats. The support for iCal means that it can display Google Calendars.

Sadly, when we tested Lightning, it didn't seem possible to edit a Google Calendar, but it does at least let you stay up to date with other calendars.

Different colours can be assigned to calendars, which helps keep them distinctive.

Tasks can be created with categories, locations, reminders and attachments. They can be converted to messages or calendar events. A status and progress percentage can also be assigned. It's a shame that there's no way to create sub tasks although this can be acheived with categories.