Email Client : My Thunderbird Settings

Recently, as part of my second life of "stock and fx trading" (talked about in trading), I have got on to the stage that there is a need for a full scale proper offline email client for a particular email account.

This is because that email account is used in a local FX (foreign exchange) forum that generated quite a fair bit of emails from many local foreign exchange traders shared trading tips on the market, fx news, advices as well as trading plans.

I have been using the web version of Yahoo for the mails but it got really difficult to use. In addition, I shared that email account with a few friends of mine who are in the similar trading business and we wanted to use only 1 email account. This means it is possible a friend read an email in the Yahoo online client and then mark it as read when I myself have not read it. Or horror of horrors, he might have deleted it before I even read it :)

So finally last night, I downloaded the email client which I wanted to test out a long time ago but found no "business case" to do so (typical IT speak). It is the Mozilla’s Thunderbird 2 email client. I love testing out new software and here is a proper reason to.

Off the hook (and I still dun know why but probably because I was too anxious), I got into BIG BIG trouble with the email client as it immediately downloaded all my emails after I set up the account to link it to YAHOO. And then Thunderbird went ahead and DELETED them from the server ! Without a chance do the RIGHT settings first before it started downloading. I don't know why. All my 450 mails in the Yahoo mail server were all gone ! Oh my god. I had no way of putting back the 450 mails back to the server (I dun know how..) so the next best alternative is to download the 450 mails in my Thunderbird (using an add on called ImportExportTools available at this web site) and save all 450 mails as Windows Mail format so that my friends can use them later (by importing them into their mail client then). Sigh.

So after the disastrous start, I then go to Menu>Tools>Accounts Setting and then did the very important setting of "leave messages on server" and uncheck the number of days as well as uncheck "Until I delete them". The latter setting is actually quite important too as I don't want my own deletion on the email client to affect the server copies in case my friends want them. Else if I delete the mail in Thunderbird client then when I synchronize the client with the Yahoo mail, it will also delete those mails in the server and giving my friends no chance to read them.



There are a few other settings I found I need to do last night after playing around for 2 hours.

I got very upset as Thunderbird keep marking my emails as "READ" even though I just preview them for a while or in fact, just move the mouse to the mail for a short while while I do something else. After a lot of looking around, I could not find a setting to switch off "marking an email as READ". I had no choice but to go to MENU>TOOLS> OPTIONS> ADVANCED to make the settings as big as the number field can let me, which is 99999 seconds. That's a day according to my calculations :)



There is another setting I made which is dangerous actually. Basically by default, Thunderbird blocks remote images and other content in messages from people you don't know. This will protect your privacy because spammers can actually use remote content to detect if and when you have viewed a message from them, and thus to verify your e-mail address. Read the help article here on why Thunderbird blocked images here.

I think most email clients do that. For example, my office Outlook does that too. But because most emails in my office are from trusted sources (your colleagues), then it is not an issue. But for my case, for this particular email account, as most of the emails are from strangers, the blocking takes place every single email. This resulted in the very very irritating message at the top of the email header. It is no fun to see it on every single message.
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In any case, I am not exactly worry as this email address is not my primary business or personal one so I dun care about spamming. I believe Thunderbird will also block the spam mails well too.

So I went ahead to do a BIG change. Go to MENU>TOOLS>OPTIONS>ADVANCED and click on CONFIG EDITOR. Search for this key: mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image and it will appear as TRUE. Double click on it to change to FALSE and viola, it worked.



Finally, one last setting I did last night was to do a nested email thread. As there are tons of replies on a same email, it is great to see nested email threads. The default setting for Thunderbird is not so. Just click on the left hand side icon or go to VIEW->SORT BY->THREADED to get a nice threaded view.

I am now enjoying Thunderbird and surfing around for new add ons to make my experience better.

Free source rocks !


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