Add emoticons

This article was written for Thunderbird but also applies to Mozilla Suite / SeaMonkey (though some menu sequences may differ).

Thunderbird doesn't provide a way to add more emoticons to the "insert a smiley face" list box used when composing a HTML message. You need to embed a .GIF file for the emoticon/smiley face in the message. However, the Smilie Inserter and MailTagger extensions for Thunderbird make it easier to do that. For SeaMonkey a modified version of MailTagger is available.

The MailTagger web page on the Mozilla Add-on web site currently has a "This add-on has been disabled by an administrator" message. Its not clear if that is temporary. However, the add-on is also available at the projects web page.

When you add a emoticon using the "insert a smiley face" list box its actually stored as smiley face (text) characters in the message. Thunderbird displays any smiley face characters as a graphics image while other email clients display the smiley face characters as is. This is a built-in feature enabled by the mail.display_glyph setting and why what you see and other users see may differ. However, if you embed a .GIF file using one of the add-ons everybody sees a graphics image.

The Smilie Inserter add-on hasn't been updated for a long time. See Updating add-ons for how to bypass the version checking etc. Supposedly if you do that with 3.x it works, except that you can't use the scroll bars in the insert window.

PostSmile is a standalone Windows utility that lets you add a emoticon to a message by dragging and dropping it into the message body. There are both free and premium versions, the main difference is the number of emoticons bundled with it.