Thunderbird is an email client available for free download.  I’ve been using over the last number of months in college as our college email address is a webmail that is accessed through a fugly portal.  I needed access to the mail but didn’t want to have to deal with the unwieldy portal so I grabbed Thunderbird and pointed the email at it so I can just deal with those emails from my desktop. 

Last month I discovered a really neat trick via lifehacker.com

By running a simple line of code you can create another tab within Thunderbird that runs Google Wave for you. 

Google Wave is a nice tool but suffers from being another inbox for you to check, this puts it right beside my email which makes keeping an eye on it much easier. 

The fun doesn’t end there, by just altering the code slightly you can actually create another tab within Thunderbird for any other service - from Google Calendar (for those who schedule through that) to Delicious for your social bookmarks.  I changed it slightly to put Google Docs there as I use that a lot in College to share documents and collaborate on projects.  The changed code to run for putting google docs in Thunderbird is: 

Just follow the same steps as detailed in the Lifehacker article for setting up Google Wave in Thunderbird.

This has made Thunderbird a real workhorse for me, an app that handles my email, my Google Wave, and my Google Docs and leaves my browser free for browsing / researching.