I just updated to the latest version of Thunderbird, 3.1.7. There’s lots to like in this release compared to the archaic 2.0.0.24 I was using before. Unfortunately, it also includes one feature that I really dislike: the address-book status icon. This is where Thunderbird puts a star next to each email address in the message header:
I have three complaints about this “improvement”:
- I don’t really care if the email is in my address book. Don’t force me to deal with information that I’m not interested in.
- The icons are very distracting — one by itself might be alright, but a cluster of them, in bright yellow, just outside the area of visual focus (the message body) continually pulls my eye away from what I’m trying to do.
- It looks like my 7 year old daughter ran amok with a sheet of foil star stickers. There’s a time and a place for that kind of thing, and my mail reader is not it.
After far more research and experimentation than I care to admit (including downloading and searching the Thunderbird source code!), I figured out how to disable the address-book status icon in Thunderbird 3.x. Here’s the result:
How to hide address-book status icons in Thunderbird 3.x
To hide address-book status icons in Thunderbird, you need to add the following code to your userChrome.css:
.emailStar { width: 0em; visibility:hidden; }
userChrome.css lives in a chrome subdirectory of your Thunderbird profile directory. If you don’t already have a userChrome.css, just create one with the above contents.
After updating userChrome.css you’ll have to restart Thunderbird to see the change. Enjoy your newly uncluttered Thunderbird UI!