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How to add thread lines in Thunderbird for Mac

If you use Mozilla Thunderbird on Mac and read messages in threaded view, it may be a little hard to track a thread tree. For instance, in this screenshot it is difficult to tell who MikeR’s last message at the bottom is in reply to. Did he reply to his own post, Mike Easter, or [...]

Deleting individual newsgroup messages in Thunderbird

Let’s say you’re reading a newsgroup with Thunderbird, and some spam gets posted. Or someone posts an offensive message you just want to remove from the message list. Or any case in which you just want to remove an individual article you’ve already downloaded. In the past, it wasn’t possible to delete individual messages. At [...]

When all you want to know is if the bug is fixed

For some specific bugs, I’ve added myself to the CC list, because I’m interested in knowing when the bug is fixed (and maybe when the target has changed). Problem is: because there has been a lot of discussion in a few of those bugs, I’ve been getting a lot of bugmail that I’m not interested [...]

What is compacting folders in Thunderbird, and why you should do it.

Are your Thunderbird folders taking up a lot of disk space, even though you only have a few messages? Is Thunderbird slow to open folders? It’s probably because you have not compacted your folders. When you delete a message, it doesn’t really get deleted from the folder. It gets marked as deleted. Thunderbird sees that [...]

Filter news based on any header

A long awaited feature was landed on the Thunderbird trunk last night. It is the ability to filter newsgroup messages based on any header. You can test it by downloading and using the latest Thunderbird trunk builds. Thanks to Joshua Cranmer for creating the patch.

XPAT on news.mozilla.org

[modified version for Thunderbird 2 users. Thunderbird 1 users go here.] Every once in a while, someone on news.mozilla.org will enquire about receiving an error message “A News (NNTP) error occurred: xpat not supported“, when trying to search newsgroups on news.mozilla.org; so I thought I’d post my ‘stock’ answer. News.mozilla.org is hosted by Giganews, who’s [...]

Improving Support

Three months ago, I met with Paul Kim, to discuss ways of improving Mozilla user support web content. I initially thought we wouldn’t need all 45 minutes, but it turned out that 45 minutes wasn’t nearly enough. He asked if there was a page anywhere in which I outlined my thoughts on improving support. I [...]

Small attachment icons in Thunderbird 2

After we worked out how to limit the height of the attachments pane in Thunderbird, Windows users now have to deal with big attachment icons. What’s up with that? Here’s how to make those icons small: Go to Tools–>Options–>Advanced–>General, and click on “Config Editor“. In the Config Editor, search for the preference mailnews.attachments.display.largeView. Double-click on [...]

Please help with Thunderbird options documentation

I wanted to have an options reference page ready for the Thunderbird Help site, when Thunderbird 2 is released; but it looks like I won’t be able to get it done on time. I’ve updated the wiki page, with screenshots in a table, and my work so far. If anyone is willing to contribute to [...]

Keeping threaded view in Thunderbird

Users of Mozilla Thunderbird, may have noticed that if you are viewing messages in threaded view, clicking on a column name (other than the thread column) will turn off threaded view. What if you want to keep threaded view on? Go to Tools–>Options–>Advanced–>General, and click on “Config Editor“. In the Config Editor, search for the [...]