Posts Tagged ‘thunderbird’

Logging in Thunderbird

I’ve had occasional issues with Thunderbird 3, sending out messages via smtp.gmail.com:465. I’m doubting it is my ISP at work, because I’ve been roaming around, and it seems to be the same issue. Long story short, if I click “Send Later” and batch the messages, it seems to be better than just writing a message, and sending it immediately – that seems to just bring up a message saying its connecting, and nothing happens for a long time, before I either cancel it or it times out.

Found some useful Mozilla documentation, on debugging Thunderbird using NSPR logging. Simply, you can do:

export NSPR_LOG_MODULES=SMTP:5
export NSPR_LOG_FILE=~/tmp/tbird.log
/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin

NSPR_LOG_MODULE also accepts POP3, and IMAP as arguments. The third line obviously only works on Mac OS X – on Linux, just replace with the path to thunderbird-bin.

Forced password changes

My employer has this odd policy where they force you to change your password, once every six months or so. Its annoying, because sometimes, you forget your password. Its inherently more insecure to write it down somewhere, isn’t it? Plus, you can’t reuse passwords.

However, my mail client always has my password. And therein comes, a useful Thunderbird add-on, called Password Exporter.

Now, I can see what my last known password was, and login when need be.

Migrating Firefox/Thunderbird from Linux to OS X

Today, I completed my migration of my personal machine to one that runs OS X. For those not following Twitter, I picked up a MacBook Air last week, and have slowly been moving my stuff off from the Dell. The Dell can now serve as a full development machine, and I can start running “unstable” Linuxes on it now (“unstable” like Rawhide).

But I digress. This is about how I moved Thunderbird and Firefox over to my new box.

Thunderbird:
Copy ~/.thunderbird over, and place it in ~/Library/Thunderbird on OS X. Only problem I found was with the Lightning plugin, which managed to grab itself an update, and all was dandy.

Firefox:
Copy ~/.mozilla/firefox over, and place it in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox. All the plugins I had, just ran fine.

Only snag? I couldn’t find a copy of Firefox 2 online. Good thing I had a copy on another Mac… Why did I need Firefox 2? Google Browser Sync. Though I suspect that in the very near future, I’ll move over to Mozilla Weave, and get all my systems up to speed with Firefox 3.

Next up, lets see how long I run OS X on the Air… or do I replace it with Linux if it annoys me significantly enough?


i