July 24, 2015

Thunderbird and Windows 10 Default Mail App

I reported last week that Windows 10 has changed the way you setup your Default Apps. The biggest change is this has to be done within Windows System Settings, not from within the application. If you attempt to have the application to tell Windows it wants to be the default application you will get this annoying and unhelpful message: For Firefox, Mozilla has implemented a change coming with Firefox 40 that will open the Default Apps setting in Windows 10 when the user tries to make Firefox the default browser within Firefox. This is needed because it appears when a user…

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Using Maildir Mailbox Feature in Thunderbird

Also introduced in Thunderbird 38 (38.0.1) was the ability to use Maildir mailbox format. Like OAuth2, this too has not been very well documented. I have no idea what this does or why you would want to use it. Further, I have not tried it, especially after I found this information on the Mozilla Wiki with the warning about enabling said feature: Though, we aren’t sure of the side-effects of using maildir as the default store on a profile that was created on Berkeley mailbox(mbox) format; so we suggest you to create a fresh profile to work with maildir so as to avoid…

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Using OAuth2 for Gmail in Thunderbird

When Mozilla released Thunderbird 38 (38.0.1) on June 11th one of the new features was being able to use GMail within Thunderbird without having to go into your GMail account and enable the ‘less secure authentication’.  Problem is, how to enable this feature in Thunderbird is poorly documented. After some searching, I found the answer in an unlikely place…the comments on the article from The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog announcing Thunderbird 38: In an existing GMail account, you can switch the “Authentication Method” from “Normal Password” to “Oauth2″ (in both the IMAP and SMTP setup separately). Connection security should be SSL/TLS. If…

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UI Changes Coming Firefox 40 Windows 10 Only

Once again Mozilla is fiddling with Firefox’s UI with Firefox 40 due for release on August 11th. However, it will only affect Windows 10 with this release (Firefox will auto-detect if it is being run on Windows 10 and apply this theme). Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 will be getting the theme updates in a later version. With Firefox 40 on Windows 10…we’ve matched the tabstrip and toolbar to the native Windows 10 theme. This includes refinements to our standard icon set, as well as much improved HiDPI (>1dppx) support. All of our first-tier icons now have 2× variants that are…

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