Script: The Thunderbird Options Dialog
Overview
This course shows a Thunderbird Options dialog. You can select the sections and tabs of the dialog just like with the real dialog. When you click on an item, however, you are going to get a short explanation, and if you click on the "Show more" button there, if present, you get a multimedia presentation of what that optin does.
General System Defaults
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In its registry Microsoft Windows stores which installed mail software is the default one. Whenever another application wants to send something as Email it usually uses that default application.
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S5: [0:0.350] This is what this setting does: Let's say you look at a website. Here we use Mozilla Thunderbird as the webbrowser, but it works exactly the same with Microsoft Internet Explorer.
S10: [0:10.600] On webpages we often find not just links to other webpages, but also links to email addresses. When we click on such a link the webbrowser cannot handle it itself, it has to call another application that knows how to send emails. Let's see what happens when we click on S15: [0:26.550] the link. [Pause 1.4s] As you can see a Mozilla Thunderbird email composition window opens, with the email address already filled in!
S20: [0:36.300] A second example: In a text processing application like Microsoft Word, or, in this example OpenOffice Writer, we have the option S25: [0:44.800] to send a document via email.
When we do that, S30: [0:48.800] again a Thunderbird Email composition window opens, already ready with the document to be sent.
S35: [0:54.650] This seems like such a simple setting, and yet I cannot explain all aspects of it here. For example, on Linux the situation is the most complicated one since there is no one single desktop environment like on Mac OS-X or on Microsoft Windows. Desktop environments like Gnome or KDE each have their own settings, and many applications that support interfacing with email have individual settings for which email software to use. On Microsoft Windows applications CAN use the global setting, but they can also have their own individual setting.
If the Thunderbird option S40: [1:29.950] to make itself the default mail application should fail for whatever reason you can change this setting manually in the operating system.
S42: [1:38.050] On Microsoft Windows XP, for example, you can find several places where the default mail client is set.
One place is the S45: [1:44.250] "Add or Remove Programs" window. Most people know this dialog very well, because this is where you go to remove software. Few people look at the other options that this dialog offers, among them on the bottom left an icon S50: [1:57.900] "Set Program Access and Defaults".
It is also directly accessible from the Start-menu. S55: [2:04.200] The history of this feature in Windows XP is very interesting, by the way. It is there because of politics. Microsoft added it to Windows XP with Service Pack 1 because of the anti-trust investigations that were going on at the time, so that competitors' software could be made the default software for webbrowsing, email, media player and for instant messaging.
Another place in Windows where the default mail client is set is S60: [2:30.100] the Internet Options window.
By the way, you have to be an administrator to be able to change the setting, because with these dialogs I just showed you can only set the mail client globally for all users on the system.
S65: [2:44.050] Here are some useful links. DefaultMail is a tiny freeware tool that sets the default mail client on a per-user basis. The second link shows what it does, the first one links to the software. Then there are two more, one from Mozilla, the other one from the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University. The Mozilla one is the FAQ – the list of Frequently Asked Questions (and there answers of course) – and the other one is the mozillaZine knowledge S70: [show END] base.
General – Start Page
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This is a page that is shown briefly when you start Thunderbird and select a folder, for example your Inbox, as long as you didn't select a message yet. The default is a small Thunderbird product webpage at Mozilla with some useful links.
General – New Message Alerts
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Here you can ask Thunderbird to inform you audibly and visually about the arrival of new mail messages.
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S5: [0:0.700 show windows desktop area where alert is about to be displayed] When new messages arrive Thunderbird briefly displays an unobtrusive alert window, S10 [0:05.200 display alert window] like this.
You can also have it play a sound and even add your own sound, like S15 [0:10.500 show alert and play sound]this for example. However, the downside is if you receive lots of spam or distribution-list emails you are probably going to turn the sound off very soon. Unfortunately Thunderbird plays the sound for all incoming emails, before filtering. So you cannot choose to play a sound only for those emails that are put into your Inbox after all filtering has been done. It would also be nice to be able to choose different sounds depending on filter criteria, for example, play a different sound for email from your boss.
S20: [0:40:700show extension URL and description] You might want to add the Thunderbird add-on "Mailbox Alert" if you want this missing feature. It lets you set a different message and sound for each folder, among many other features, and is easy to configure.
If you would like the alert window to stay up longer than the default three seconds you can set the value in milli-seconds in the configuration editor. I tell you about this editor in another section for the Advanced tab of the Thunderbird Options S25: [show END] dialog.
Display – Formatting – Colors
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Here you can choose the colors used to display messages. Messages such as HTML mail may have its own color settings, in this case those are used.
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Display – Formatting – Plain Text Messages
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Most messages arrive as plain text messages without formatting such as this. Here you can customize how such text is displayed. In plain text messages so-called emoticons are often written with plain text characters. Here is an example: ;-) The same emoticon in graphical form looks like this:
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S5: [0:0.600 Display message with fixed width text; text contains a small table and space-formatting] Let's start with fonts. First, this dialog sets your Plain Text preferences. If you receive emails with so-called Rich Text with embedded formatting information like text color, text style, etc., the settings in this dialog are ignored.
S10: [0:15.900 Overlay display of old email on old monitor] It is helpful to know some history. Email is a very old medium, and originally you could transmit nothing but western text characters. Emails didn't even use one full Byte, i.e. 8bit, per character. Instead they used just 7, making it possible to have only 127 different values, or characters. Back then Plain Text was not just normal, but it also meant something different than it does today. Back then it meant having the electronic equivalent of a mechanical typewriter, where the characters you have available are few, western and fixed.
S15: [0:50.950 remove s10-overlay and show Chinese "plain text" email] Today such a message is "Plain Text" too – it just uses a different encoding. S16: [0:55.600 remove Chinese email]
Plain Text today means that a document does not contain any format information, i.e. only pure characters S20: [1:02.450 show the same word with different formats - 3s] but no information how those characters should be displayed.
Now let's see what effect it has when we select variable or fixed width fonts! Right now we are looking at a message with fixed width text, i.e. every single character has the same width.
S30: [1:17.300 show same email with variable width font] Here is the same text with a variable width font. Now the letter "i" takes up much less space than the letter "w" for example.
The advantage of variable width text is that it looks better, but the advantage of fixed-width text is that you can format your text better. Because all characters including the space take up the exact same amount of space you can even build tables and generally vertically align different parts of text perfectly only by using spaces and new-line characters.
[Pause 2s]
S35: [1:45.550 fade out everything and let dialog window reappear, highlight "quoted text" stuff] The next item in the dialog is about quoted plain text. Quoted text is text of emails you respond to, which is quoted in your responses in order to make it easier to see what parts of the original text you respond to.
S40: [1:59.300 show quoted text example screenshot] This is how the setting affects the display of plain text messages that contain quotes. Nested quotes are displayed with a colored bar to indicate which text belonged to which previous message. The quoted text itself is displayed in the style, size and color you choose inS45: [2:14.350 remove S40]this dialog.
[Pause 2s]
S60: [2:17.000 show some emoticons and their meaning – text and graphical form] Last we come to the emoticon option. You can tell Thunderbird to display any text emoticons as graphics. It looks like shown here. If someone sends you a plain-text message with text emoticons in it Thunderbird automatically displays them as an image.
Emoticons are added to text because when you don't hear someones voice or see their face this is the only method to convey that the particular sentence was meant as a joke rather than an insult or a complaint, for example. Still, email is a medium where it is VERY easy to be misunderstood.
Please note that this option to display text emoticons as graphics applies to plain-text messages S65: [show END] only.
Display – Formatting – Fonts & Encodings
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Here you can select the fonts used to display messages. The font you use also depends on the encoding of the message: for example, a message with japanese characters needs a font that contains those characters. Plain text messages always use the fonts you select here. HTML messages may be allowed (or not) to make their own selections. Encodings determine how the characters you see are represented internally. With the wrong setting you and/or the recipient might only see "garbage characters".
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S5: [let the mouse click on "Fonts", open(show) fonts window] This option requires a longer explanation, at least if you really want to understand what it's all about.
S10: [show ASCII table example] Historically email, which was developed in the USA in the 1960s, decades before the first PC, was a text-only medium, and with "text" I mean English text with only a few basic characters and no formatting information, like bold text etc. Also, back then computer memory was extremely precious, every single bit was important! That's why no one thought about support for all languages and all characters used by them. Engineers were happy enough being able to handle those few English language characters.
The consequence is still felt today. The basic latin characters introduced back then with the ASCII code still have VIP treatment. Many of todays codes including the one common standard for internationalized fonts and encoding, UTF, give those characters a very special place:
S15: [show other codes and how they all start with ASCII characters] If you only use those ASCII characters which you can see in the table those other codes place them at the exact same place in their table of codes. This means that as long as you only use those characters in text, whatever encoding you choose, it will be okay!
S20: [show how other characters than 0-128 differ between encodings] If you use any other characters, which in your own language may very well be part of the basic alphabet, you must pay attention to the encoding, however. That is because another encoding may either not include those characters at all, unless you use one of the UTF encodings which includes them all, or it has them at a different position in its own encoding table, so that the numeric value representing a character in one encoding stands for a completely different character in another encoding.
TODO
Display – Tags
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You can "tag" your messages with colors. Tagged messages will be displayed in the message list overview using the chosen color. You can tag messages manually, using the context menu (click the right mouse button over a message), or you can let filters (see our courselet on filters) do the tagging automatically.
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S5: [0:00.750 highlight the tags] In Thunderbird tags are arbitrary combinations of words and an associated color – and they are ordered.
S10: [0:07.250 highlight in sequence from top to last tag] The upper-most tag has the highest weight, the bottom-most one the lowest. Here the "Important" tag is the upper-most one.
S15: [0:15.200 show message list Thunderbird window] The order is important because in the message overview list messages are shown in the color of the highest-order tag associated with them, S20: [0:22.850 show message header with more than one tag, highlight the tags] , here the red color of the "Important" tag.
You can tag messages using three methods. You can setup a filter which tags messages automatically as they arrive in your Inbox, which we show how to do in another course.
Or you can tag messages individually while reading them. Right-click S25: [0:40.100 right click over message and open context menu] over a message to see the context menu for that message. Go to the "Tag" menu S30: [0:44.450 do it, and open sub-menu] item. You can do that for each tag you would like to assign to this message.
S35: [0:49.800 Remove context menu] You can also reach this menu from the menu bar at the top. S40: [0:52.650 show animation] This is the exact same menu for tagging as in the context menu.
S45: [0:57.250 remove menu] Tags don't just look nice and colorful, you can also sort messages by their tags in the message overview, and you can tell S50: [1:03.800 show context menu] Thunderbird to show the tags in the overview, so that you don't just see the top-most tag because of the color, you get to see all tags as text.
Tagging is an important feature S55: [1:14.200 remove menu] that is going to help you keep order, so use it! S60: [1:16.800 show END]
Composition – General – (misc. stuff)
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These are options for message composition. You can forward messages to another email address as part of a new email, either as attached document or as part of the main text area. Auto-Save helps if you are afraid of loosing work through computer crashes. The encoding method quoted printable helps making emails smaller - under certain conditions. To prevent accidentally sending a message prematurely you can tell Thunderbird to ask for confirmation if you press the shortcut keys for sending. Finally, you can force wrapping of long plain text message lines for better readability.
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S5: [0:00.750 highlight "Forward message"] Let's look at what happens when you forward a message.
First let's have a look at S10: [0:05.300 animation: select message in overview, press "Forward" panel icon, open window] how the composed message looks like when we forward a message as attachment. As you can see the text area is clean, but in the attachment area there is the forwarded message as an attached item. Let's now look at how the message looks like on the recipients side.
S15: [0:21.250 show received forwarded message] This is how the recipient sees a message forwarded as an attachment. Double click on S16: [0:26.100 doube click, open message window] the attached email, and you can view the forwarded message. Also note the header – the forwarded message retains its original header. In this example the email address is the same each time but you can see the time and date are different.
Next let's look at how Microsoft Outlook users S17: [0:44.100 show the Outlook message screenshot]see our message, in case you are concerned about compatibility issues. As you can see it looks very similar. There is one difference of another kind: Unlike Thunderbird Outlook has difficulties with my Russian signature text. This is a bug in Outlook related to how it handles UTF-8 encoded messages, which is the current standard for encoding international characters. This has nothing to do with what we show here, but since it came up I thought I mention it.
But let's double-click S18: [1:13.200 double click and open window with attached Outlook message screenshot] on the attached message. Again we can see the forwarded message just like with Thunderbird. In addition to the Russian text issue we see that Outlook does not offer the option to display plain-text emoticons as images.
Remember how this looks like, because next we are going to look at the other setting, Forward message "inline".
S20: [1:32.200 start animation, press forward, show compose window] This is how the same message looks like when forwarded inline. One important thing to consider when setting "Forward" to "inline" is that the original messages format may not be conserved. For example, if the forwarded message contains rich text, but we have chosen to compose our messages as plain-text only, the format information of the forwarded message will be discarded.
Therefore, whether you set "Forward" to "inline" or to "as attachment" depends on what kind of user you are and what kind of messages you receive and write yourself. Most users today should set this to "Forward as Attachment", because they receive and write rich-text emails. Those who prefer plain-text messages probably prefer the "inline" setting. S25: [2:11.750 show END]
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S100: [0:0.750 highlight autosave option] If this option is enabled, the current state of the email you are writing is saved to the Drafts folder at the specified interval. If your email client or your computer should crash (which shouldn't happen of course) or if your computer shuts down because someone stumbled over your power cable, you don't loose all work. You can also S105: [0:17.400 show and highlight save-button in composition window, show text bubble with keyboard shortcut CTRL-S as alternative] press SAVE at any time while composing a message. S110: [0:20.050 show END]
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S200: [0:0.750 highlight option] This option requires a longer explanation, because it does not really make any sense whatsoever unless you know the historic background.
S210: [0:08.600 show ASCII table example] Historically email, which was developed in the USA in the 1960s, decades before the first PC, was a 7-bit medium. Seven bit where enough to encode 127 characters, and for the English language all you really need is the basic alphabet and a few additional characters like dots, minus, colon, exclamation mark etc. For decades that was enough! Only in the nineties(!) became it necessary to send emails which contained something else but those basic western characters! Until then messages were exchanged mostly in ASCII code, that code developed in the early 1960s which contains just 95 printable characters.
S215: [0:49.500 show highest number text] As you can see in the table the highest number needed to represent one of the characters available in the ASCII table is 126. For storing this number on a computer only 7bit are needed. Back then every single bit was very valuable, so even though Bytes always had 8bit the practical engineers of the time thankfully used this feature of ASCII that didn't require the 8th bit and wrote the software to only use 7bit. Back then that was a significant saving of space and time.
S220: [1:21.650 show text: mail transfer was and partly still is 7bit] Why do we care today? Well, only in the early 90s the situation really began to change. The SMTP protocol used for exchanging emails to and between mailservers was designed for 7bit transmissions. S225: [1:35.900 show next text] Today sending files as attachments to emails and sending text with non-latin characters is normal, but at the beginning of the 90s these options didn't exist!
S230: [1:45.800 show other text] Since email even today is basically a 7-bit medium and we have lots of 8-bit data to send, from attachments to non-latin text, several encoding methods were introduced as part of the MIME standard in the 90s. MIME made all those things possible that we take for granted today: being able to send attachments and not just plain text emails, to send rich formatted text and to use characters other than latin ones. If all your email software including the server can handle 8 bit your mail client can send 8 bit directly, but if anywhere on the path to the destination there is a piece with 7 bit it won't work correctly. In addition, software like Thunderbird uses 7 bit encoding for its own local storage of emails. That's why 8 bit data in emails is encoded in 7 bit using one of two methods: S235: [2:37.150 show something] base64 or quoted-printable.
S240: [2:41.000 show base64 example] Base64 encodes every single value and is great for all-binary data like binary files sent as attachments. The example shows the first few lines of a picture attachment of an email after the binary picture data has been encoded using base64. Note that all characters you see are basic latin characters, that is because all values are 7bit values, and those are represented by printable ASCII characters. This is why we can see this character potpourri after encoding.
S245: [3:12.400 show quoted printable example] Quoted-printable only encodes those values outside the 7 bit range of values, but it needs much more space for those values it does encode compared to base64. This means it is the perfect encoding to use if most values are 7 bit, and only a few fall outside that range. In the example you can see that the basic latin characters are left untouched and only the characters not found in the basic ASCII range are encoded, because they are represented by 8-bit values. You can imagine that if you send Russian text this encoding would be most wasteful, since every single Russian character would be represented by three characters. But don't worry, even if you enable the quoted-printable encoding in this dialog, Thunderbird automatically determines that such messages are better encoded with base64. So if you should enable this option or not really depends: for most users it won't make a difference at all. With this option turned on you are more compatible with older 7-bit mail systems and you don't really loose anything. S250: [4:14.550 show END]
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S300: [0:0.750 highlight next option, sending-shortcut] Did it ever happened to you that while writing a message you accidentally pressed the keyboard shortcut for "Send Message" while you were still in the middle of writing? It's easier than you think, because in Thunderbird the shortcut is CTRL-RETURN, and you press RETURN quite frequently while writing messages. Enabling this option lets Thunderbird S305: [0:21.500 show confirmation window] ask you for confirmation before really sending the message. For those "power-users" out there who love keyboard shortcuts because it lets them work much quicker, the S310: [0:30.250 highlight default] default of the confirmation dialog is the "Send" and not the "Cancel" button, so they can quickly press RETURN again.S315: [0:36.650 remove everything, show END]
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S400: [0:0.750 highlight plain text option] This setting only affects you if you turned the rich-text S405: [0:04.350 show account setting for HTML mail] HTML-Mail setting offfor this email account. It has a historic background. S410: [0:10.000 remove S405] Back in the old days many computer monitors could display no more than 80 characters in a single line. Since some characters might be used up by the email client, for example to display line numbers, it was a good idea to write emails with no more than 72 characters per line. Today there is another reason to wrap plain-text messages: Monitors are much larger, and if a user opens the mail clients window fully unwrapped lines can be VERY long indeed if there is no line break. Reading a message with very long lines is very difficult, however, especially if there also are many lines. This is why newspapers have several relatively narrow columns. So in order to make live easer on you AND the recipient of your plain-text emails this setting exists. It's easier for you because you don't have to remember pressing RETURN once in a while in order to start a new line, and for the recipient your messages are easier to read. So you should definitely leave this turned on and probably also accept the 72-characters default value. Again, this setting only affects plain-text messages. S415: [1:21.950 remove highlight; show END]
Composition – General – HTML
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Writing messages with styled texts (underlined, bold, colored letters, etc.) is achieved by sending emails as HTML instead of plain text. This is the same language used for writing webpages. Here you can select the default
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S5: [0:0.750 highlight HTML section] This setting only affects messages written in rich-text HTML mode. In this mode your message composer adds format information to the text, for example if a word should be displayed bold, italic or normal, what color the text and its background has and which font you would like it displayed in. Plain-text messages contain only the text and no hidden format information, and how they are displayed is up to the recipient. If you receive plain-text messages you select how you would like to see them S10: [0:30.300 highlight Display-section in Options dialog] in the Display section of the Options dialog, and there under theFormatting tab.
S15: [0:35.000 click, highlight and OPEN Font: option] You can select a concrete font to use, or you can select just the general type of font. Variable width or fixed width are fonts where all characters have different or the same widths, respectively. S20: [0:47.750 highlight monospace for 3s] "monospace" is just another word for "fixed width". "Serif" fonts have little S25: [0:53.050 show some serif characters and non-serif characters LARGE] so-called serifs, non-structural details at the end of some strokes that make up a character. S26: [0:58.750 remove S25] Be careful when selecting concrete fonts: if the recipient does not have a font with that name on his or her computer their email client is going to display the email using whatever their configured default font is, so it may look completely different than it does on your machine! That is because the fonts themselves are not sent to the recipient with the email, only the name of the font!
S30: [1:22.250 click, close S15, highlight and OPEN Size: option] By specifying not a concrete size like 12pt you let the recipients email client choose a base size which best fits their particular type of monitor, and you only specify if you want a text to be larger or smaller than this base font size. S35: [1:36.400 show END]
Composition – General –Configure text format behavior
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Not everyone wants or is able to read messages with formatted text. That is because originally email could handle only plain (western alphabet) text. Here you can configure some recipient domains explicitly as plain text or as formatted text recipients.
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S5: [0:0.750 highlight section, click button, open window] The send options are only important if you compose messages in rich-text HTML format. Everyone can handle plain-text emails without problems, but not everyone wants to receive rich-text emails. That's why this settings dialog exists – again especially for historic reasons, when there were lots of people who had a hard time viewing formatted content because they were using text-based email software on text-based terminals.
S10: [0:25.500 click and open drop box] If you composed an HTML email and send it Thunderbird checks if all recipients are listed as being able to read such emails. If this is not the case, i.e. if you did not add the domains those recipient addresses belong to to the list of HTML mails in this dialog window, Thunderbird is going to take the action you configure here. By default this action is to ask you what to do.
S15: [0:47.850 highlight "send both" option] If you select the option "Send the message in both plain text and HTML" Thunderbird sends the message as a so-called MIME-encoded multi-part message, which virtually all email clients today can interpret. The recipients email client is then going to choose if it wants to display the plain-text or the HTML-version. The only disadvantage of this setting is redundancy – the size of the message increases because the text itself is included twice. However, today that really is not an issue so you can safely select this setting. S20: [1:20.850 show END]
Composition – Addressing – Address Autocompletion
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Enabling these options lets you some save typing when writing emails to people in your address book or in the directory. Even while you type an address Thunderbird checks if what you typed thus far matches a person in the address book, and as soon as it finds a match it displays a list of choices which you can select using the cursor keys or the mouse, or simply press RETURN to accept the topmost choice.
Composition – Addressing – Automatically add..
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Whenever you write an email to someone it is likely you may have more than just this one contact with this person, so why not add them to your address book? A nice side-effect is that people in the address book don't accidentally get deleted by Thunderbirds spam-filtering system, and if you have auto-completion turned on (above) next time you won't have to type the whole address.
Composition – Spelling
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Enable the first option and Thunderbird always starts a spell check before it sends any messages. Enable the second option and any words not found in the active dictionary are underlined red. Here you select the default language, but you can always switch to another (installed) language dictionary while you are writing a new message.
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This is how spell checking works in Thunderbird:
S5: [0:04.300 show message composition window with spell-as-you-type marked text]"Spell check as you type" underlines any unrecognized words red. If you press the right mouse button S10: [0:11.650 move mouse and click, show context menu over an underlined word] over an underlined word you get to see a context menu where you can select the correct word or take some other action. S11: [0:18.000 remove S5 and S10] Personally, I always work with this option turned on and the other one, to spell check before sending, off. That is because I can already see which words Thunderbird doesn't know while I'm typing and choose to ignore the warning or react right away. If I turned on the other option I would have to endure the spell check dialog for almost every email, because the dictionaries are far from complete and I always have a few words in my texts that Thunderbirds spell check does not know about. However, it is a great feature to catch most typos so I would not turn it off completely. Please note that this spell check does a word-by-word comparison. "Thunderbird" and "Thunderbirds" are two completely different words for this software. It also does not take any grammar rules into account.
You can download more dictionaries S15: [1:09.400 show download website] by clicking the link. After the website opened you must not simply left-click S20: [1:14.750 show text bubble: "If you use Firefox, don't left-click on the link, RIGHT-click!"] on the link to the dictionary, if you are using the Mozilla Firefox browser! Instead, you have to right click and in the context menu select S25: [1:23.000 show animation: right-click and "Save link as..."] "Save link as...". The reason is that if you left-click Firefox is going to offer to install the dictionary – but it will do so for Firefox and not for Thunderbird! Unfortunately those two pieces of software, while they share code and come from the same organization, don't share the dictionaries or anything else.
S30: [1:43.850 remove website screenshot] So you have to download the dictionaries first and then install them using S35: [1:47.100 show animation of this] Thunderbirds own add-on installation option, which you will find in Tools menu.
S40: [1:52.100 show add-on software install window] Don't worry about Thunderbirds complaint that the extension – the dictionary is delivered as a software extension – is unsigned. Almost no extensions are because an actually useful crypto-certificate, i.e. one I didn't simply create myself, costs money. S45: [2:06.500 show END]
Privacy – Junk
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Most of your email is - or will be - junk mail, a.k.a."spam". Here you set what happens with messages you or the automatic junk filter marks as junk. You can collect all junk to review it later, or you can delete it right away. If you would like a "paper trail" of what happened to messages you can enable logging. Each time you manually mark a message as "junk" or "no junk" you also train Thunderbirds automatic filter, so that over time it is going to work better and better. If you reset the training data you can start again as if you never trained before. This might be useful if the automatic filter starts making too many mistakes.
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S5: [0:0.750 show several junk mails - as text] Thunderbirds supports several defenses against the assault of junk mails in your Inbox. Its own junk mail filter, is only the last line. In this dialog you set only some global settings for how Thunderbird handles spam on all your email accounts.
S10: [0:15.550 show account window with junk setting highlighted] There is another, more detailed setting available for each account, in the account specific dialog.
S15: [0:22.800 show something, Bayes etc.] Thunderbirds junk mail filter uses sophisticated statistical methods and not just "dumb" filtering. When you first install Thunderbird no statistical data exists yet, it has to be collected first. That means initially the junk filter is very bad and hardly filters anything. After a relatively short time, usually within a week or two depending on how much email there is to learn from, the filter removes most of your junk mail, and after a month or two of training it is often able to identify 90% of all spam messages correctly and have almost no false positives, i.e. email that is valid but Thunderbird thinks it's spam.
S20: [1:00.900 highlight "When I mark..." option] Thunderbirds statistics based junk filter needs you to train it. That is why S25: [1:06.500 show message overview window and highlight "Junk" icon] the action pane has a button that says "Junk" or No Junk". If Thunderbird thinks the message is Junk the button is labelled "No Junk" and vice versa, so that you can tell Thunderbirds filter when its own conclusion about the message is wrong. S30: [1:19.000 remove S25]
When you press that button while viewing a message Thunderbird thought is no junk, this setting determines if the message is moved to the extra junk folder, so that you can later check it together with all other messages in it to make sure there was no valid message marked as spam. However, I prefer to have Thunderbird delete messages I myself mark spam immediately. After all, when I make this choice by pressing the button I do so because I already looked at the message, so what sense is there in keeping it?
S35: [1:49.150 highlight "Mark... read"] This is a useful option for all messages determined to be junk, if marked manually by you or automatically by Thunderbirds statistics-based filter. Most people have the feeling they need to act if there are any unread messages. If this option is set junk mail does not increase the Unread Messages count and therefore can't make you nervous about having missed a message any more. This helps to let you continue work in peace and not act on every single junk message, but delay checking the junk folder only once every few days or so, which is much more efficient.
S40: [2:21.200 highlight "Enable... logging"] If you would like to have a paper trail of what the automatic junk filter does, enable this option. This is very useful especially at work. Sometimes a few days or even weeks later you may have the problem to try to remember if that message someone claimed to have sent you was deleted by the automatic junk filter or if you did it yourself. If you have a log file you can simply check if the message in question appears in it – and now you can blame it all on the software! While the result is the same it is psychologically much easier for the other person to accept the situation if the computer is to blame and not you, so this logging feature may save your work relationship with your co-workers. Of course, If it turns out it was you and not Thunderbird who put the important message into the trash you loose the benefit of the doubt...
S45: [3:08.650 highlight "Reset..."] When you find that the automatic filter is making too many mistakes although it's been trained for a long time, your best bet is to reset the statistical training data and start from scratch. Sometimes you collect too much data which partially contradicts itself, and the pattern of spam messages also changes over time so that the training data collected thus far becomes a hindrance rather than a help in identifying spam. S50: [3:29.650 show END]
Privacy – Email Scams
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Thunderbird tries to warn you of scams by looking for several characteristics usually used in scam emails. For example, if a URL link to some website tells you it would link to secure.bank.com but really links to somewhere.else.com Thunderbird marks the message as a potential scam. This method is not trainable, unlike the junk mail filter! For every single email you can tell Thunderbird that it's not scam if it thinks so, but that is only for that one message, Thunderbird does not learn anything through this for future messages from the same source.
Privacy – Anti-Virus
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Thunderbird stores all emails in a folder in one single file. This is a problem with some antivirus software, when it is set to delete any files that contain viruses and you receive a virus via email, e.g. as part of a spam email message. Then all your email in your Inbox will be deleted by the antivirus software! To avoid this issue enable this option. Now Thunderbird downloads emails from a POP-server into separate files, where the antivirus software scans them (such software does that automatically). Only then is the email appended to the Inbox folder file.
Privacy – Passwords
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This is a very useful convenience feature. If you use more than one account, for email or for news, you can let Thunderbird store those passwords for you. If you would like to protect your stored passwords from being used by anyone who gets access to this computers filesystem you can set a master password, which is used to encrypt all other passwords, so that without the master password no one can use or decipher the stored passwords.
Attachments – Attachments Folder
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This is another convenience feature. Each time you save an attachment you received in an email to your computer, you have to tell Thunderbird where in the filesystem it should store it. If you always store them in the same folder, for example, on the Desktop, you can tell Thunderbird that this is your preferred folder and avoid further questions.
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Attachments – Download Actions
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The text is wrong - Thunderbird is always going to ask you before it does anything with an attachment, for security reasons. Here you can edit actions performed with attachments, for example which application is used to open it. You cannot add actions here. Actions are added when you open an attachment you receive and check the box "Do this automatically for files like this from now on" in that dialog.
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Advanced – General
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These options select how Thunderbird displays messages in the message overview list. Return receipts are emails sent by Thunderbird automatically to the sender of an email who requested to be informed when you receive their message. Advanced configuration opens a window where you can edit Thunderbirds configuration database manually. You should know what you are doing if you do so... on the other hand, many entries there are self-explanatory. Just don't make changes you cannot take back!
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Advanced – Network & Disk Space – Connection
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Here you only need to change something if you are not directly connected to the Internet but require a so-called proxy.
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Advanced – Network & Disk Space – Offline
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Here you will find several settings that determine how Thunderbird behaves when you switch between online & offline modes - which you have to do manually in the File menu. For example, you can instruct Thunderbird to download all messages in certain folders when you go offline, or to send any messages in the outgoing email folder when you switch to online mode.
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Advanced – Network & Disk Space – Disk Space
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Thunderbird stores all emails in "email folders". However, in the filesystem each such folder is represented by one single file where the actual emails are stored, and another file with meta-information. When you delete an email it is not always deleted from the folder-file, but only from the (significantly smaller and therefore faster to edit) meta-information file. Here you can tell Thunderbird to delete all deleted messages from folder-files if it would save space on the filesystem. Hint: You can always force this process by selecting Compact Folders in the File menu.
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Advanced – Update
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The Mozilla foundation regularly releases updates for Thunderbird. Here you can choose if Thunderbird should automatically connect to the Mozilla webserver and look for updates for itself, and what it should do if there indeed are any.
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Advanced – Certificates
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Few people are going to use this dialog. Here you can examine and add digital certificates, which are used for the encryption features of Thunderbird. People with digital signatures need to have them signed by a higher authority, and those authorities in turn need to have their own signature. The signatures of some of those authorities - which are businesses - are already delivered with Thunderbird. You can add anyone else whom you trust. Also, certificates might be revoked at any time, you can ask Thunderbird to check certain trusted websites for certificate revocations.