Mozilla Thunderbird Problems

As noted in my parent article on email programs, I have tried practically every major email program, as a former IT consultant advising novices as well as experts, but moreso just for convenience. My personal preference is Mozilla Thunderbird, but I still do not recommend it for non-techies and especially not for companies unless they have a very good techie who is successful in customizing the program to be user friendly for people.

Here are some issues which I still have not resolved:

File Attachments Re-Downloading

I get a lot of large .jpg files. When I open the message, I can see the file attachment as well as the in-line display of the photo, and it took awhile to download the message. When I click to save the attachment or the displayed photo, it downloads it again! It doesn't matter if I click on the attachment and choose Save As or Detach, same thing. Or if I click on the image and choose Save Image. Since it already downloaded the image / file, why the #%^&! does it need to download it again ?!?!? And then if I forward the message, guess what ... It downloads it again!!

There is no excuse for this. And, of course, I've never had this experience in any other email program.

File Attachments opening

When I click on file attachments to open them, it works with PDF but fails with JPG, Word DOC and Excel XLS. This is so simple, but Thunderbird is user hostile about this.

In all other Windows programs and every other email program I've ever used, clicking on these attachments quickly opens them with the program associated with the extension so you can quickly view them, e.g., .DOC with MS Word, .XLS with Excel, .JPG with ACDSee, and so on.

Thunderbird was trying to open Excel files into MS Word, but when I specified Excel for Excel files, it opened them in Excel but then started trying to open MS Word files into Excel! I guess this is Mozilla's way of being hostile to Microsoft.

Everything works fine in Windows Explorer, Outlook Express, etc., and this problem exists only in Thunderbird.

If I click on .JPG it just dies, and I haven't been able to fix this. I've found no solution to opening JPG files except for the laborious task of saving them to some directory and then browsing to that directory and choosing that particular file, for each and every attachment.

Update: Reset the associations in Tools | Options | Attachments

Replies Include Attachments

Emails sent with JPG files attached will display the JPG files in-line at the bottom of the message. That is convenient, but when I reply it includes those photos, requiring me to manually scroll down and delete them. Replies should not include the attachments!

Temporary Freezeups and Zero-Byte File Loss

So often, after I've already downloaded a message with file attachments such as .JPG files and am viewing the photos in-line under the message, when I right-click on the file and choose to save it to disk, guess what? It downloads the file again! This is especially frustrating when you've just downloaded a BIG email message with multiple attachments, but it's little delays even with small emails.

Further, it often fails to download some properly, resulting in zero byte files. I must go back and double-check every file before deleting the original from my mailbox. I never choose "Detach all" because that deletes the files from the email message, but if it gives me a zero byte file then the image is lost. Thunderbird is like a very unreliable employee (like some of my techies) who say everything is OK but you must waste time double-checking them all the time and find a lot of errors.

Word Wrap

I've had some recipients of my email complain that my emails don't wordwrap, i.e., instead of paragraphs they get a long line which scrolls off the rightside of their screen, requiring the horizontal scrollbar to read, which they said is a pain. Obviously, this is not a way to get customers but a way to lose them. Especially relative to my competition who use Outlook (no matter how messy Outlook makes quoted messages). This could be a show-stopper for my continued use of Thunderbird relative to Outlook, if I can't figure out when this does and does not happen.

I have looked at messages that come back, and yes, there is a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom, and somewhere quoted below are single lines instead of paragraphs.

I have already set these options in mailnews.js:

pref("mail.wrap_long_lines",                true);
pref("news.wrap_long_lines",                true);
pref("mailnews.wraplength",                 72);
pref("mail.compose.wrap_to_window_width",   false);

I have looked in the code and see that Thunderbird puts in some PRE tags whenever you reply to or forward email which you receive in plain text format, if your default composition is in HTML like most people. The PRE tag is entirely unnecessary and only causes this problem. Whoever decided to put in PRE tags must have been a techie sadist on the open source team, and nobody caught that and rectified it. There is no solution I can find on the net.

(Some techies may argue that PRE is preferred for viewing techie log files, but what's more common -- replying to or forwarding plain text messages in HTML, or techie log files? Which should be the default, and which the manual setting?)

I come out manually copying this unwrapped text to a text editor, then separately copying & pasting it back to my HTML message.

Little Things

Renaming folders in IMAP often doesn't work. I must switch to Outlook Express for that. Same for moving folders in IMAP.

When you sort a folder by name (by clicking on the Name column), you cannot jump to the J people by just hitting J on your keyboard, unlike Outlook and other programs.

After doing your business after sorting by Name, when you return to sorting by date by clicking again on the Date column, if you previously preferred Descending, then you get Ascending. This is techie lazy code, the kind of thing you run into in version 0.8 or alpha versions before user-friendly QA. Clicking on Date (or any other field) should return you to your previous sorting preference. In Thunderbird, you must just remember to click twice on Date when you return to that sorting. It's not a big deal, since you just click twice rather than once, but it's just one of those typical techie shortcomings that new users need to become familiar with.

Forwarded messages have brackets around them, [Fwd: whatever subject], and I can't figure out how to get rid of the brackets. Searching the config files for [ turns up no relevant finds.

Thunderbird Community Unavailable

The last time I edited this article on June 15, 2008, I tried going to the Thunderbird forum for some solutions, forums.mozillazine.org , but that page announced new forums at forums-test.mozillazine.org and automatically forwarded me ... which immediately came back with a "Server Not Found" error. I couldn't get thru to the next day.

Most of my posts go unanswered anyway.

Quirk: Opening Multiple Messages

By default, you get only two Thunderbird windows. For example, I'm browsing my folders. I see a message from my staff about a customer, which I open and am looking at the details. Someone calls on the phone so I must browse to another folder and open their email. Opening that message *replaces* the first message. When finished, I must go back and find the first message I had opened and re-open it.

With Outlook, I can have multiple messages open.

To do this with Thunderbird, right-click on the message and choose to open it in a new window. Otherwise, you lose your previous window.

Things I edit in the config files

Thunderbird offers two ways to configure it: either by the pulldown menus or else the configuration files in
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\defaults\pref\mailnews.js

It seems that most things in the configuration files cannot be easily found in the pulldown menus. In Tools, Options, Advanced, Config Editor, you get a list of items which must number about 1700 and there is no search feature. Try reading 1700 lines looking for something to change...

So it's better to go to the above directory to search in a text editor.

For some things, I had no choice, nearly from when I started using Thunderbird, because some menu choices did not work. For example, if I right-click on an account folder, I get this screen which shows me only "-----^" in red instead of the options:

... so I started to depend on editing the config files. That's much quicker and easier anyway.

Below, I haven't listed everything I edited in the config files, but at one point I started keeping notes, and here they are:

// MP: Thunderbird by default did not quote messages I replied to.  Instead, it sent them as file attachments.  So I changed that.

pref("mail.forward_message_mode", 1); // 0=default as attachment 2=forward as inline with attachments, (obsolete 4.x value)1=forward as quoted (mapped to 2 in mozilla)

// MP: Thunderbird by default put my reply at the BOTTOM of the message, not the top!! So the other person receives the message and sees their own message, not mine, until they scroll down, sometimes WAY down.  Secondly, since nearly everyone else's email program quotes at the top, when Thunderbird quotes at the bottom, the dates get really mixed up.  So I changed Thunderbird to put my reply at the top.

pref("mail.identity.default.reply_on_top", 1); // 0= 1=top 2=select

// MP: I think this allows you to reply in either text or HTML depending on the original message, but I'm not sure. It got rid of an annoyance.

pref("mail.default_html_action", 3);          // 0=ask, 1=plain, 2=html, 3=both

Personal preferences:

pref("mail.imap.expunge_after_delete",      true);

// MP: Just a style preference.
// 0=no header, 1=" wrote:", 2="On   wrote:", 3=" wrote On :", 4=user specified
pref("mailnews.reply_header_type",          3);

In IMAP, by default, all your mail is stored on the server, not on your personal computer, in my case my notebook computer. It's important to keep a copy of your email on your computer for two reasons:

• When you are offline, you can still read your email
• You have a backup of your email on your personal computer in case the server's hard disk crashes or some other problem

To do this, choose:

File -> Offline -> Download/Sync Now -> Select ... and then check the boxes for the folders you want to download

It is not clear to me what happens if you delete a message on the server. Does it delete it off your hard disk, too, in a "Sync"? Probably. That's OK unless you have a hard disk crash, start with a blank inbox, and then Sync. That would delete all the messages from your offline storage.

To be safe, I create a tree of important folders in my Local Folders, and them periodically move (not copy) all messages in all important folders. (You can drag and drop, but I use the Nostalgy add-on.)

To speed up your Thunderbird, change the settings from putting Sent mail on your server to the Sent "local" folder on your hard disk. Just right-click on any account, choose Properties, then Copies & Folders.

You should also be careful to switch Drafts and Sent mail to your Local folder. There is some problem with Drafts between Thunderbird and my Plesk QMail IMAP server, whereby Thunderbird things saving drafts has failed. For example, I had a 6 megabyte message I was working on and noticed my DSL modem going all out plus slow internet otherwise, and later checking my Drafts folder I discovered 14 copies = 100 MB worth of one message, all at 11:31am, plus another 10 copies = 60 MB at 11:51am. Similarly, copying a message to my Sent folder often fails.

Add-ons

I add the Nostalgy add-on, which helps me move and copy messages between folders. You just type C to Copy or S for "Save" (actually, it moves the message instead of copying), and the best thing is you can just type any part of the folder's name and it will quickly come up with a shortlist. For example, type "regis" and the "Software registrations" folder will pop up into the shortlist. If you're like me and have a zillion folders and subfolders, this saves a tremendous amount of time since you don't need to navigate your tree. It also helps you instantly find a folder among the haystack.

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