I have been using Quicktext as an addon for Thunderbird for a while now and find it very useful.

Recently I upgraded to Thunderbird 7 with Ubuntu 11.10. The Quicktext download doesn’t work beyond version 6. So I modified it to work with Thunderbird 7. It has been working well for me, if you want it try at your own risk.

Download Quicktext 0.9.11.1 for Thunderbird 7.

What does Quicktext offer?

Quicktext is the powerful tool to automate routine and repetitive emails. You can define actions such as Hi [FirstName], and it will pickup the first name to whom the email is addressed to. Similarly you can define templates for standard email replies. You can even define where the cursor should stop.