August 26, 2020

Thunderbird and email

For me these days email is Thunderbird.

I hate Thunderbird. There are so many things that suck. But I haven't found anything better.

I use it on my Fedora linux system (currently Fedora 32).

As of 8-2020 I have downgraded from Thunderbird 68 to Thunderbird 60 in order to retain support for the Keyconfig add-on, which I consider essential.

Links in emails

Thunderbird does a bad jog of handling this.

I am revisiting this in 1-2024 after doing a full install of Fedora 39. This caused me to also install Thunderbird from scratch, and I lost whatever configuration I had done in the past to make this work. Thunderbird seems to take the view that "you will only use the Firefox browser". Very likely all of this would "just work" if you used firefox.

When I tell Thunderbird to use my default browser, it simply does nothing (does not work). Just how it determines the default browser is unknown to me, but in my case it is google-chrome (at this time anyway). I finally rolled up my sleeves and dug into all this:

Back in 2021 I had to deal with a similar issue. Back then I had reverted to an old version of thunderbird that allowed me to use a nice keyboard shortcut mapping addon (which I used to turn them all off). Newer versions of thunderbird broke that addon, and they provided no builtin feature to manage keyboard shortcuts (as they should). It eventually became more of a problem to deal with issues in the old thunderbird I had locked myself onto, so I waved goodbye to the keyboard add on and went back to using the latest thunerbird. You can read about all that in the following notes.:

In 8-2021 another issue reared its ugly head, namely it has become difficult or impossible to specify the browser Thunderbird launches for html links in emails (it defaults to Firefox). To fix this I had to go with the latest thundergird and stop downgrading to an old version.

Alternatives

I tried various web based email readers, but they are all miserable compared to Thunderbird. Their only virtue is that you can use them from any device with a browser. My usual "other device" is a cell phone or android tablet, and there are android specific mail apps that work nicely there.

I have looked at other linux hosted mail clients, but was never satified. I should look again.

Things I have had to fix and struggle with

A mail client ought to be simple and "just work". This apparently is not the case with Thunderbird. You would think that over the years it would get more polished, but it seems to go very much the other way.

Here are links to specific topics I have found to be important:

Copy all sent mail to my inbox

I like to be able to see both sides of a conversation when looking at past mail. By default, thunderbird puts all sent messages into "sent". You have two choices. Go to "Account Settings", "Copies and Folders". There is a radio button that by default copies into "Sent", you can change this to "Other" and select the inbox. Additionally there is a checkbox that says, "place replies in the folder of the message being replied to". This seems confusing and ambiguous (I guess it means my replies, but what about messages that I am originating?) I ignore this insane thing and select the inbox for a copy of sent mail.

Set up filters

Click on the "hamburger" (3 horizontal lines at the upper right). Then Tools --> Message Filters. It is pretty easy from there. I use "copy to folder" rather than "move to folder" for the handful of people I filter mail out from.

IMAP setup to use gmail

Thunderbird holds your hand nicely through all of this, and may do much or all of this automatically.

Mail is received from imap.gmail.com via port 993. I use SSL/TLS on the connection and authenticate via a normal password.

Outgoing mail goes to port 587 on smtp.gmail.com. I use a normal password to authenticate, and connection security is via STARTTLS. Thunderbird particularly annoys me by binding the "Delete" key to the "delete this email action, this has burned me badly several times.

Thunderbird customization

There are plugins and a multitude of preferences you can fiddle with. I try to use Thunderbird in a vanilla form to minimize the amount of reconfiguration I have to do when I need to reinstall it. Some things I always do (because of habits I formed and changes made by the thunderbird developers):

Address book recovery

After a full reinstall, Thunderbird lost track of my address book. The right thing to do is to anticipate this, export and save the address book, then pull it back into the new thunderbird. However, we didn't do that, but it was not very hard to recover it from backup media.

The first thing to do is to find your "profile", which is in the ~/.thunderbird in your home directory (or the backup copy thereof). In my case, the items of interest are: 

./3pva2om0.default:
-rw-rw-r--. 1 tom tom    6924 Feb 13 22:47 abook.mab
-rw-rw-r--. 1 tom tom   21300 Feb 14 11:10 history.mab
I copied both of these files to the same location in the new profile and that seemed to do the trick.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!