How in the Tech

Loosely secure your Thunderbird profile with a password

By Adam Myers ⋅ July 29, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Mozilla Thunderbird, Privacy, Security

One of the advantages of keeping your email in the cloud – outside of the obvious ability of accessibility basically anywhere you have access to a computer – is the notion of security and privacy. Accessing your Gmail requires a username and password, that’s pretty obvious. But what if you have your Gmail, or any other email system, configured in Mozilla Thunderbird? Even if you’ve told Thunderbird not to save your account credentials, a nosy person could still obtain access to all your previously downloaded email. To some, it might sound ironic how email stored in the cloud is actually more secure!

If you are using a shared computer, perhaps by your family, and additionally share the same Windows profile – not that uncommon actually – you might be interested in adding a bit of security to your Thunderbird profile.

Profile Password is a Thunderbird extension that lives up to it’s title billing. The extension adds another context menu off Tools that allows one to set a password on their current Thunderbird profile. Once set, further attempts to open Thunderbird will require the password before access can be granted. Without a password, another user is unable to view your current email or access your address book. Additionally, you can also lock the main panel of Thunderbird to provide the layer of security while the client remains open.

Pretty nice alright!

However, there is one giant caveat – the security isn’t very strong, actually it’s quite basic. A savvy user can track down your email profile folder on the hard drive and still access any of the contents through the file system. Still, Profile Password is a rather quick and simple layer of security that may be just enough to keep prying eyes at rest.

Download Profile Password