Difference between revisions of "Thunderbird"

Revision as of 22:18, 21 March 2014

Mozilla Thunderbird is an email, newsgroup, and news feed client designed around simplicity and full-featuredness, while avoiding bloat. It supports POP, IMAP, SMTP, S/MIME, and OpenPGP encryption (through the Enigmail extension). Similarly to Firefox, it has a wide variety of extension and addons available for download that add more features.

Installation

Install thunderbird from the official repositories.

Other alternatives from the AUR include:

• thunderbird-esr-bin^AUR (a long-term supported version)
• thunderbird-beta-bin^AUR (the official cutting-edge version by Mozilla)
• thunderbird-nightly^AUR (a nightly version)

There are a number of language packs available, if English is not your preferred language. To see a list of available language packs, try:

$ pacman -Ss thunderbird-i18n

Extensions

EnigMail - Encryption

EnigMail is an extension that allows writing and receiving email signed and/or encrypted with the OpenPGP standard. It relies on the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG).

It can be installed from addons.mozilla.org (e.g. through the Add-ons Manager) or the AUR. Common packages include: thunderbird-enigmail^AUR and thunderbird-enigmail-bin^AUR.

Sharing the public key

There are a variety of ways to distribute the public key. One way is to upload it to a public keyserver network. Another is to share it with friends who are also using email encryption.

Encrypting emails

Encryption does not always work properly with emails containing HTML. It is best to use plain text by choosing Options > Delivery Format > Plain Text Only in the new email window.

Once the email is finished it can be signed through the OpenPGP menu.

Decrypting emails

Assuming that the email was encrypted properly, just trying to open it should result in a popup window asking to type in the keyphrase.

Enabling high privacy

By default, Enigmail discloses some information in the email headers and in the OpenPGP comment field. This includes which Enigmail is being used and its version. Both can be disabled in the Config Editor (Edit > Preferences > Advanced > General).

To delete the email header set extensions.enigmail.addHeaders to false.

To disable the Enigmail comment, set extensions.enigmail.useDefaultComment to true or unceck: OpenPGP > Preferences > Advanced > Add Enigmail comment in OpenPGP signature ("Expert Settings" needs to be enabled).

Disabling the user agent itself (which shows one is using Thunderbird) is currently not possible.

FireTray - Tray icon

FireTray is an extension that adds a customizable system tray icon for Thunderbird. It can be installed from addons.mozilla.org or the AUR package thunderbird-firetray^AUR.

Lightning - Calendar

Lightning is a calendar extension that brings Sunbird's functionality to Thunderbird. You can use addons.mozilla.org or the AUR package thunderbird-lightning-bin^AUR to install Lightning.

Tips and tricks

Setting the default browser

Recent versions of Thunderbird use the default browser as defined by the system MIME settings. This is commonly modified by the Gnome Control Center (Gnome Control Center > Details > Default Applications > Web) (available in: gnome-control-center).

This can be overridden in Thunderbird through Edit > Preferences > Advanced > General > Config Editor by searching for network.protocol-handler.warn-external.

If the following three are all set to false (default), turn them to true, and Thunderbird will ask you when clicking on links which application to use (remember to also check "Remember my choice for .. links").

network.protocol-handler.warn-external.ftp
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.http
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.https

Plain Text mode and font uniformity

Plain Text mode lets you view all your emails without HTML rendering and is available in View > Message Body As. This defaults to the Monospace font but the size is still inherited from original system fontconfig settings. The following example will overwrite this with Ubuntu Mono of 10 pixels (available in: ttf-ubuntu-font-family).

Remember to run fc-cache -fv to update system font cache. See Font Configuration for more information.

~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <match target="pattern">
    <test qual="any" name="family"><string>monospace</string></test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="same"><string>Ubuntu Mono</string></edit>
    <!-- For Thunderbird, lowering default font size to 10 for uniformity -->
    <edit name="pixelsize" mode="assign"><int>10</int></edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

Webmail with Thunderbird

See upstream Wiki: Using webmail with your email client.

Troubleshooting

LDAP Segfault

An LDAP clash (Bugzilla#292127) arises on systems configured to use it to fetch user information. A possible workaround consists of renaming the conflicting bundled LDAP library.