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

Mozilla Thunderbird is a popular open-source alternative to Microsoft Outlook by the same organization that brings us Firefox. Like Firefox, Thunderbird stores all it’s customization, settings, and email in a user profile which defaults to the Users folder in Windows. The profile folder is buried quite a few levels deep but it can be accessed quickly using a Windows environment variable called %APPDATA%. To jump to your Thunderbird profile location in Windows Explorer execute a run dialog window with WIN+R and type %AppData%\Thunderbird.

If you’ve recently upgraded to a lightning fast solid-state hard drive you are probably interested in keeping your C drive as clean and light as possible. Relocating your mail box to a new location is pretty simple with Microsoft Outlook – you just cut and paste the Personal Folder .pst file to a different folder. When you launch Outlook it will realize it’s mail folder is missing and prompt you to browse to the new location. Thunderbird, however, will not behave in this manner – rather it will assume there is no profile as if it was a new installation and initiate the New Profile Wizard. Clearly not what we want!

To successfully move your Thunderbird profile instead requires a modification to the profiles.ini text file located in %AppData%\Thunderbird folder above. The contents of the file are rather spartan by default; it includes just the pathing information to your user profile.

Opening the file in your text editor of choice it’s not overly complicated to see what needs changed. The two keys we are interested in are titled IsRelative and Path. Disable relative file paths by switching the key from 1 to 0. Lastly, change the Path key to the full path of the newly relocated Thunderbird profile.

When you next launch Thunderbird it will automatically open the profile in the new location, without any prompting or further intervention.

I wrote yesterday about how to interface Hotmail with Gmail now that Microsoft has opened up their Hotmail service to all POP3 clients. Without being so technical, the opening of POP3 allows you to check your @hotmail.com or @live.com addresses from a traditional POP3 client – such as Outlook or in this case, Thunderbird. I’ll detail how to connect Thunderbird to the Hotmail service, but, generally speaking, the information is applicable to most other desktop email applications

1. From within Thunderbird open Tools->Account Settings from the top menu.



2. Once inside Account Settings click Add Account.



3. Choose Email Account.



4. Then supply your Name and Hotmail/Live email address.



5. For the Server Information select POP and use the address pop3.live.com for the Incoming Server.



6. Your Incoming User Name should already be completed for you.



7. Then choose a label for your Account Name – this can be anything you’d like.



8. Finally confirm that everything entered previously was correct.



9. Up till this point it’s been pretty straightforward and not unlike adding any other email account. But in order to tie Hotmail in fully, you must enable POP3 over SSL. You should now be back on the Account Settings dialog with your newly created Hotmail account. Select Server Settings underneath Hotmail, then under Security Settings choose SSL. You’ll notice the port has changed from 110 to 995.



10. From this same dialog, I recommend to Leave messages on server by checking the appropriate box under Server Settings. Otherwise, Thunderbird will pull the emails down locally and remove them from the Hotmail web interface – likely eliminating one of the major advantages of having your email in the cloud.



11. Lastly, if you want to be able to send email from our Hotmail/Live account you’ll need to add Microsoft’s SMTP server information. Still in the Account Settings dialog click Outgoing Server (SMTP) and then  Add. Provide the information as seen below.



12. Eleven steps later you are now able to send and receive email from your Hotmail account from within Mozilla Thunderbird. If you have multiple email accounts configured in Thunderbird, you are able to switch between identities in the Compose window – click the From drop down to toggle back and forth.

The popular open source and free email client Thunderbird, by the same group that brings us Firefox, does not allow for any automation when it comes to using the carbon copy feature. CC and BCC allows the email composer to send a copy of the email to another recipient. Why is this something that you may be interested in automating? In some work environments, perhaps your manager needs to see all a copy of all email correspondence done on your behalf. In a home environment, perhaps you like to keep a second copy of your email at another email address. As a parent, perhaps you would be interested in configuring the BCC – blind carbon copy – to send a copy of all email your child composes. There are many other reasons this may prove useful to you, so here is how you can accomplish it.

1. Download and install the Thunderbird add-on Auto-CC. Auto-CC is an experimental add-on as it has not been fully tested, therefore you are required to register at mozilla.org in order to obtain the download link. Don’t worry, it’s free and the add-on is bug free in my usage.
2. To install the add-on, from within Thunderbird navigate to Tools->Add-ons. Click Install and browse to the locally downloaded add-on from step 1. You’ll have to restart Thunderbird to finish off the installation.



3. Unfortunately, Auto-CC has no graphical interface to configure it by – perhaps that is why it is still marked as experimental. The good news, it’s not overly complicated to configure. In Thunderbird navigate to Tools->Options.



4. From the Options window click on the Advanced tab and then the Config Editor.



5. From Filter drill down to the Auto-CC configuration area by typing auto_cc.



6. You are now presented with four options that can be configured, all of which are pretty self-explanatory.
   • extensions.auto_cc.auto_cc_address: the address you wish to forward to.
   • extensions.auto_cc.send_as_bcc: control whether the forward is CC or BCC, true for BCC.
   • extensions.auto_cc.enabled: toggles Auto-CC on or off.
   • extensions.auto_cc.init_toolbar_button: toggles a button on the Thunderbird toolbar to quickly enable or disable Auto-CC.

Auto-CC fills a void in Thunderbird, though I do recognize it is rather niche. The main downside is that the feature applies across all configured accounts in Thunderbird, and while the toolbar button helps in toggling the functionality, it’s not an ideal solution. Again, maybe this is why it is still an experimental add-on. Worth the hoops? You be the judge.

At the office I’m forced to use Outlook as my main communication and scheduling tool. Outlook gets a lot of bad raps and while at one time I’m sure most of it was justified, nowadays it really isn’t that bad of a product – at least Outlook 2007. However, that doesn’t mean I use it outside of my main profession. Technically, I’m a Gmail user. Having your entire email spool in the cloud, accessible from anywhere, is a huge win for me. Obviously webmail existed long before Google got in the game but it was their unobtrusive interface and quick searching that converted. Still, there is something to be said for your traditional desktop email client. While I try a lot of new products and technology, I’m a very slow converted and suffer from attachment issues with the tried and true, irregardless of whether newer is in fact better. Because of this, I have my main Thunderbird install configure to pull mail from Gmail. It works for me, but that isn’t the summary for this article.

I am also an iPhone user, though just recently. Much to my chagrin, iTunes does not sync your iPhone contacts to and from Thunderbird – where all my contact information is stored throughout the years. A quick Google uncovered a few ways of linking the two, but I have to admit it all seemed a bit click and pray and not something I’d like to rely on. Knowing that iTunes can pull contact information from Gmail and coupled with the fact that I do use Gmail, even indirectly, I set out to use Gmail as my exclusive contacts database. Exporting and importing the addressbook is straightforward and perhaps a topic for a later date. That being said, I wasn’t particularly warm to the idea of managing my contacts with just the iPhone or in Gmail – I still wanted the flexibility of Thunderbird.

Today I found Zindus, a free Thunderbird extension that allows you to manage your Gmail contacts from within Thunderbird. Installation and configure is simple.

1. Download the extension and save it locally.
2. From within Thunderbird click on Tools->Add-ons.
3. Click Install and point it to the Zindus extension you just downloaded.



4. Still in Thunderbird, provide your Gmail credentials to the add-on from Tools->Zindus.



5. Click Sync Now.

I came across a problem today with Mozilla Thunderbird (though not necessarily isolated to this client) and the POP mail server. It came about because a user has been out of the office and not pop’ing his mail to the desktop. The server had accumulated 100MB of email over this time.

The problem

Thunderbird has a default pop timeout of 45 seconds. In that 45s, the client must authenticate, the server must create a lock file, and copy over the mail spool into a temporary file, before Thunderbird can begin downloading the mail. If the server cannot copy the 100MB mail file into a temporary file within the 45second limit the timeout message occurs.

The solution

The solution is logical, but inconveinent to implement. Microsoft Outlook has a nice ‘server timeout’ setting in preferences, but Thunderbird’s is buried in a javascript file in the user’s profile (prefs.js). Editing that file and appending

user_pref(“mail.pop3_response_timeout”, 300);

to the end will increase the timeout to 300 seconds. After relaunching, Thunderbird can successfully download mail without the poplock busy error.

I keep all my email, always have. It’s amazing when some seemingly random and unimportant email becomes anything but seven months later. I don’t proclaim to be special but over the decade I have accumulated tens of thousands of email. Searching for that one address or phone number of a long lost contact took awhile in Mozilla Thunderbird, a long long while. Gmail accomplishes this same feat in 2.3 pico-seconds. I timed it – I wouldn’t lie to you.

I dumped Thunderbird as my primary email client, after a long affair with the younger and sexier Gmail. It wasn’t easy – I fear change, a creature of habit if you will. Yet I found the notion of a centrally accessible mailbox intriguing and worth a chance.

After setting mail-forwards for all my addresses to Gmail, I forced myself to use it for a few weeks. Old habits die hard. What I discovered with Gmail was nothing short of amazing. Being sincere, here was a Webmail that was actually on par with a traditional desktop email client. We’ve been spoiled by Google’s slick and simple interfaces, and Gmail was no different. Gmail is fast, african swallow fast.

It wasn’t long before I came across a nice little app that will import all your messages into Gmail from Thunderbird (as well as a few other clients). It worked well enough, albeit slower than I’d hope. My slight gripe is actually a fault of Google rather than this application, I think atleast. The Gmail interface will show the Received Date from Gmail, rather than the date the email was actually composed and sent. Consequently, Gmail shows all my imported messages for the same date, the day of import. I blame Gmail as when the mail is POP’d (a nice feature I did not touch on) back from Google, Thunderbird displays the correct date. I found this as a pretty big gotcha at first, but obviously I have overcome it. Still, maybe it will be addressed some day? Better yet, Gmail should allow us to upload our old email; eliminating the need for an external program.

Gmail has numerous other features that I am not going to get into at this time. My purpose here was to dispel any preconceived notions and invite change into your life. With some luck, you may end up like me, left wondering how you ever managed without.