Thunderbird : Java Glossary

Features

• built-in Baynesian spam filters. The spam filter comes pretrained, able to detect most spam
• anti-phishing
• spell check
• indexed search
• imports from many other email programs including Eudora and Outlook.
• S/MIME encryption but not yet PGP. However, the EnigMail add-on does support it. You have to install GnuPG manually first. If you have windows, install gpg4win. Import your exsting PGP secring.skr keys and pubring.pkr keys in Enigmail. Don’t try to do it in GunPG.
• The address book records whether that person prefers HTML or plain messages. This is a feature I have been begging for, for over a decade.
• Some IAPs block you from sendingh mail through any mailserver but theirs. Thunderbird has a feature where you can direct all you outgoing mail through a single IAP mailserver, but marked as if it were coming from your various other servers. You still can pick up mail from your various mail servers.
• It can handle GMail, but not other webmails, without an add-in.
• It has all kinds of add-on/extension applications and themes. I picked the GreenTB theme to give it a distinctive look. It is not as easy to install them, as in Firefox, since you find them with your browser, download them to your local disk, then find them in Thunderbird to install them. You can’t go looking for them directly in Thunderbird.

Gotchas

• The place you configure your outgoing SMTP server(s) is hidden in a peculiar place where you would not think to look. Look in the left panel on the Account settings. Scroll down past all your accounts to the very bottom. This will reveal a line labelled Outgoing Server (SMTP). You can then select add or edit. Thunberbird recommends using a single server for all your outgoing mail, usually the one provided by your IAP. This speeds up sending mail since only one server has to be contacted, and means only one server has to be correctly configured.
• The import mail from Eudora failed. I deleted all of Thunderbird’s *.msf mailboxes and tried the import again, this time successfully. When it is done, check over the files in the C:\Users\userid\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\ randomid .default\mail\ You will see it littered with the remains of your earlier attempts to import. You can delete these.
• Thunderbird will not import your signatures from Eudora. Further it lets you have only one signature for each account. You don’t select the signature manually on each message. You must copy the Eudora signature files to a separate data directory, rename them to *.html and then attach them to your various email accounts.
• The logo is somewhat baffling, looking more like a dove than the terrifying black thunderbird of West coast native legend.
• The junk icon toggles. This drives me nuts. Sometimes it means this is spam and other times this is not spam. Instead, use the keyboard shortcuts J and Shift-J.
• You can write your own custom extensions called add-ons. You write these by writing and modifying CSS style sheets and JavaScript.

Tips

• Thunderbird uses the term write where most programs would use the term compose.
• On Vista, Thunderbird stores its files in:
  C:\Users\userid\AppData\Local\Thunderbird\Profiles\randomid.default\
  and
  C:\Users\userid\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\ randomid .default\. Make sure you backup the entire contents of both C:\Users\userid\AppData\Local\Thunderbird\ and C:\Users\userid\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\. When you restore, make it will use a different random id. Make sure C:\Users\ userid\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\profiles.ini points to your files and prefs.js internally uses the correct the random id of where you files are.
• Thunderbird keeps track of its accounts and mailboxes in C:\Users\ userid\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\randomid.default\prefs.js. Unlike Eudora, Thunderbird ignores mail files in its directories unless there is a corresponding entry in prefs.js. You may have to manually adjust prefs.js embedded random id when you restore, especially if you backed up just the mail files not prefs.js.
• Thunderbird stores its address book an a quasi-human readable format in C:\Users\ userid\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\randomid.default\abook.mab. Make sure you back it up too.
• You can recover by creating a dummy mail account with the separate option. Then you drop files into its directory, start up Thunderbird, move them to one of the real folders, and shut down Thunderbird and repeat.
• You can give your mail boxes more meaningful names than Thunderbird assigns if you rename the directories and also rename them inside prefs.js.
• If you want to rename the random id to something sensible, you must rename it both in the roaming and local directory and all references to it prefs.js.
• To send mail to someone you have already sent mail to in past, click the to: field of a previous outgoing message.
• To customise your toolbar to add or remove buttons with View ⇒ Toolbar ⇒ Customise Unfortunately there are no icons for non-toggling is-junk is-not-junk.
• If you want to finish an unsent message, you must click edit as new, before it will let you modify it.
• You can create a CSS style sheet to control to formatting of messages, to do such things as use different colours for different quoting depths. C:\Users\ userid\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\ jee3mo5a.default\chrome\userContent.css
• Thunderbird sometimes shows inappropriate columns on the mailboxes, e.g. sender/receiver when it is you, or sender/receiver missing when it is someone else. Click on the symbol on the far right to configure what is shown.