Add emoticons

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Revision as of 10:48, 24 June 2011 by Tanstaafl (talk | contribs) (added url to workaround AMO admin disabling the add-ons web page)
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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.