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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Improving add-on installation for non-browser products
This is something I’d like to help draw some attention to. If you are using a Mozilla product, that is not a web browser, figuring out how to install an add-on turns into a very user-unfriendly experience. Too many times, I’ve seen questions…
Duration of the ‘New Mail’ alert in Thunderbird
In Thunderbird, when you receive new mail, an alert will pop up in the lower right corner of the screen (at least on Windows). Some people think it stays up for too long. Others feel that it goes away too fast. There is actually a setting for the…
Easy Gmail and .Mac setup on latest Thunderbird 2 builds
This has the makings of a great new feature for Thunderbird, and I’d like to help get the word out for testers test it. As Scott writes, One of the goals in Thunderbird 2 is to make account setup easier for folks using large ISPs (like google,…