How to Add or Attach Files to Your Contacts in Thunderbird Easily! Here;s what you need to do.
How to Add Files to Contacts in Thunderbird
Thunderbird’s greatest quality is its open-source nature, allowing developers from around the world to create extension to improve upon the client’s standard/default functionality. Therefore, many times you would want to do a certain thing in Thunderbird which is not supported, but you can find an extension or add-on for that.
It gives you a lot of freedom on how you want your Thunderbird to behave. You can customize the functionality to suit your particular needs.
So, back to the question in the title: how to attach files to your contacts in Thunderbird? Sadly, it’s not possible through the client’s standard set of features, but since there are many developers offering their add-ons, you can indeed add/attach files to contacts in Thunderbird very easily.
Many users like to add some extra information in their contacts list. Many of those can be done by simply adding more text-fields to the contact. But sometimes there are media or other type of files users want to access while opening the contact.
Take an example of one of our colleagues. He has a few contact numbers of his venders saved in Thunderbird. All these vendors have their different set of prices and other conditions. These prices were sent by the individual vendors in a JPG format. It’s a large picture with all the rates and prices written over it. It’s not possible or efficient for our colleague to type all that information into text fields associated with contacts. It would make much more sense to simply attach the file with the contact, like anyone can attach files with emails.
There’s no in-built default feature in Thunderbird to do so. But as said above, you can do it through an add-on.
MoreFunctionsForAddressBook
There are many add-ons to accomplish this in one way or the other, but one of most popular ones is called: More Functions for AddressBook, often shortened to simply “MoreFunctions”. The name itself should suggest you what it does. It has plenty of features relating to your contacts and address book, and one of which is adding/attaching any file to a contact.
MoreFunctions may have some problems with some of the builds of Thunderbird. So, if you find it is not working properly, try to update your Thunderbird or roll back to previous ones.
The add-on has plenty of additional options for users to do essentially anything with their contacts like import from elsewhere, export to VCF files, add extra custom fields, even allowing users to recover corrupt address book or deleted contacts, and so on.
The add-on doesn’t resize the pictures if you have attached image files. So, make sure if you are adding image files, do not use large sized photos as it may slow down the performance.
Also note that at this moment, you can access the attached files by going into “edit contact” mode. You cannot get them simply by opening the contacts.
NOTE that if the add-on doesn’t run well on your version of Thunderbird, you can either wait for the developer of the extension to update it or you can either roll back your own version of Thunderbird to a previous one. If you still find it problematic, which it can be in rare cases, like the categories don’t appear normal, disable the add-on by going here: Tools->Addons->Extensions->click on the Disable button associated with the extension.