I have an organizational problem. At work I live in Thunderbird. I get new orders, trouble tickets, website requests, all sorts of things all via email. Email notifications tell me to call customers, make changes to the website, run out to a customer’s location to work on their pc, etc, etc, etc. Bottom Line: the majority of my daily things to do come over email and I have no easy way to take notes or record what I’ve done for each email.
I need a Thunderbird Extension that adds a ‘Notes’ panel to each email. It does not need to be fancy, plain-text would work just as well as a rich-text window. A simple flat textbox sidepanel would work, but more handy would be a time-stampted tabbed panel, one note per tab. A tab where I can jot down that I talked to Bobby Sue from 9:30a to 10:15a and her computer is a piece of junk and that the problem with her Internet connection isn’t on our side. When I disconnect someone for non-pay there are a few pieces of info that I need to record in order to reinstate them easily when their check finally comes in. Currently this means that I duplicate all the disconnect info on my paper notepad – not efficient at all.

There is one extension that comes close: QuickNote. But this acts more as a Thunderbird-wide sticky note. Handy for general stuff, but hard to tie to specific emails. I’ve tried replying to myself with my notes but it makes my inbox a mess. It also requires an Internet connection to send the email reply which I do not always have depending on where I’m at. Could I save a draft and then try to remember to send all of them when I get back to the office? Yeah, but jeez – what a pain (not to mention having notes in a thousand places).

So this is my challenge to the Internet Community: Write me an extension to add per-email note taking functionality to Thunderbird. Now.