monline

It happens occasionally that after a crash (Firefox/Thunderbird or the PC itself) starting up Firefox (or Thunderbird) you experience weird behaviour. Eg. it tells you that the app is already running or it starts, but bookmarks are not available, etc. Cleaning your profile can be easily done manually by removing a couple of files in your Firefox/TB profile, but average users are not familiar with contents of these profile folders. To help them I've written a small app (shell script using Zenity to provide a GUI) that you can put in your Gnome/KDE/etc. menu so all your users can easily access it. Of course, you're free to customize the script anyway you like (eg. take out a few questions to make it even more automatic). I've tested the script in Ubuntu 9.10 (Firefox 3.5.9 and Thunderbird 2.0.0.24).

I've found that Dovecot and Thunderbird (2.x) do not play particularly well together. Here's a short list of issues you might look out for:

• the tb-extra-mailbox-sep workaround (in case you're using Thunderbird as a client and mbox as a storage format on the server)
• problem with copying messages to the Sent folder
• problem with attachments

First I stumbled on this method. However I did not want to mess around with wrapper scripts, so I took a look at the wrapper in Ubuntu (/usr/bin/thunderbird). It turned out that the wrapper of Thunderbird v2.x sources some user specified scripts on startup (of course only if they exist): every executable in $HOME/.thunderbird/init.d that has a name starting with S gets sourced. A little googling revealed that this is already well documented in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

If I remember well, the shortcut in my Thunderbird at home (TB 2.x, Mac OS X 10.5.x Leopard) for starting a new message is Cmd+Shift+M. I'm not sure whether this is so by default (at least the official list of TB shortcuts tells me otherwise) or it was me who remapped it to this combo, but the fact is that I use this shortcut for this functionality. However at the office I use Ubuntu and TB has the "Move again ..." functionality assigned to this shortcut by default. Using the Keyconfig extension you can rebind almost all shortcuts of Thunderbird (or virtually any Gecko based app that you can install the extension into). With this extension you can make sure that the shortcuts are the same, whereever you use a specific app.

There're at least two ways for doing this:

1. Either use the "Folderpane Tools" extension.
2. Or do it yourself by editing your prefs.js config file. Here's the MozillaZine page on the topic and here's a shorter version.

I just had a very annoying experience. My X session crashed while I was in middle of writing a very long email. Unfortunately the "autosave" feature was not enabled in my Thunderbird profile. It's weird a little bit, because I'm quite sure I've never disabled it and on my Mac at home it's enabled by default. You can even check this in the Config Editor, look for the mail.compose.autosave property and check whether it has true or false as default. I just checked: in the Windows version of Thunderbird v2.0.0.6 the default is true, thus autosave is enabled. In the Ubuntu 7.04 version of Thunderbird v1.5.0.14pre (that's the latest for the mentioned Ubuntu release) the default is false, thus autosave is disabled. Very annoying. At least now I've learnt that I should not trust to have the same default settings in the different platform versions of a cross-platform software. :-> Or maybe the problem is with v1.5.x TB against v2.0.x? Never mind ... it's still very annoying.

I had a problem with my signature file on the Mac for as long as I can remember. The default encoding of my new (outgoing) emails is set to Central European (ISO-8859-2) since I mostly correspond with my country people. My signature contains my last name and starting a new
letter always resulted in my name written as "M¸ller" instead of "Müller". Today I've found the solution here. You have to save the signature file in Western (Mac OS Roman) encoding instead of ISO-8859-2 (which is the charset of the email itself where my signature gets inserted).

First of all, you'll have to install the Keyconfig extension. It allows one to override some existing keyboard shortcuts or define new shortcuts both in Firefox and in Thunderbird. The Thunderbird command name for the "Edit / Paste Without Formatting" operation is cmd_pasteNoFormatting. So all you have to do is to assign a new shortcut to the default "Paste" key binding and assign the Ctrl+V to this cmd_pasteNoFormatting command. I've done it and it worked for me on Mac OS X and with TB 2.0.0.0.

My first impression is that not much has changed, at least not from a user's perspective. However some small, annoying things have broken.

I've always been a keyboard-maniac and wanted to control as much of the OS and programs without leaving the keyboard as possible. In Mac OS X I've found that this is not possible in a number of situation. However you can change this (at least partly) in "System Preferences" / "Keyboard & Mouse" / "Keyboard Shortcuts" and select in "Full keyboard access" the "All controls" option.