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Integrating Skype Into Mozilla Thunderbird
Clicking On Names Or Numbers In Thunderbird To Place Calls

By Nadeem Unuth, About.com

The concept of presence in unified communications aims at putting your contacts at reach, wherever you might be. It is very convenient to just click on a contact's name or any personal information about them in their email messages or contact details to call them, without actually requiring to launch a softphone. And the call can be free. This can be achieved by integrating a VoIP softphone service like Skype into your Thunderbird email client. Here are ways you can achieve that.

Skype Toolbar For Thunderbird

For Mozilla products like Firefox and Thunderbird, I look for plugins before anything else, as these are normally free and better adapted to the software. The Skype toolbar plugin is free, and has basic functionality for initiating Skype calls, chats and conferences in Thunderbird.

Skype Email Toolbar

This piece of software does the basic job. I have found more complaints for this product than for the plugin above. It is free.

SkypeIt

This little plugin, developed by seemingly a hobbyist, gives a context-sensitive menu on right-click, in which there are the main Skype functionalities. There exist versions for both Windows and Linux. It is free.
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