If you need help with a Firefox problem and live in Toronto, send me an email and I can meet you in person at a public place to help solve your Firefox problem. I’ve been wanting to put together some sort of system to allow support community members to schedule in-person sessions with nearby users [...]
This is something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while. In many community driven support venues, I see some bad patterns in the way users are treated. People who may be knowledgeable about Firefox end up giving bad user support, because they’re not being empathetic or approaching support with the intent of helping [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
[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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]