How to parse date/time in emails using thunderbird

March 22, 2011 5:09 AM

How can I relate time and date in the text of emails to my calendar on a mac?

I've notice on my apple iTouch that if I read an email, it highlights dates and times, so I can click on them, and put them in my calendar. I use thunderbird on my macbook and was wondering if a comparable plugin existed? For example if I receive an email saying 'let's meet on Monday 30th at 10 am', I could click on the date portion of the text and it would open up an iCal entry.

(I'd prefer to continue using thunderbird on my mac, rather than the apple mail program.)

posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth to computers & internet (3 answers total)

In OS X, these are called Apple Data Detectors (or at least they used to be, in the pre-OS X days...they don't seem to actually have a name now but that's what nerds still call 'em) and I have yet to find an add-on for Thunderbird that will either allow it to take advantage of the system feature or recreate it.

There's a Get Satisfaction thread about it with no resolution, too.
posted by bcwinters at 7:04 AM on March 22, 2011 [1 favorite]

This won't be as seamless as you'd probably like, but you could check out QuickCal. You can paste in natural language event descriptions from your messages and it will add them to your calendar. Pretty sure you can assign it a global keyboard shortcut for easy access.
posted by crosbyh at 10:25 AM on March 23, 2011 [1 favorite]

crosbyh, that's really great! Thanks.
posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth at 2:12 PM on March 23, 2011