Thunderbird and Exchange / OWA

Thunderbird does not work natively with Exchange/OWA.  That is the short answer I have been giving people for a long time.  In the past few days I have stumbled upon some software that is designed to sit between you and the exchange server and act as an interpreter.  That would be DavMail.  DavMail is not new, and like Thunderbird is an open source project so there are no licences to buy.   You simply download it and install it.

How does this affect the situation of using Thunderbird with Exchange servers?  It changes everything!

Until now we have been able (on some occasions) to convince the exchange server admin that turning on IMAP on exchange was a good idea, but for every success there have been probably a dozen failures and out of the box Exchange is totally inaccessible to standards compliant mail programs.  Evolution, Thunderbird, even the OSX Mail program can all benefit from this software because it make exchange 'just another mail server'.  The real beauty of this is that it does it's magic  from your computer so you don't need to go cap in hand to some system admin to ask them please do something, you simply install it an go from there.

When I installed the software it was simple, painless and just worked.  What is different is the way you set up accounts in Thunderbird.  Because you have put all he remote locations into DavMail, the server names you use are not the ones you would expect from the information provided by the Exchange administrator.  The server names for Thunderbird are simply localhost.  The user names are Domainname/username and will be the same as you use for OWA.

The instructions given for setting up mail accounts on the web site are only for version 2 of Thunderbird.
To setup in Thunderbird 6 and latter do the following.
Give the account setup wizard your mail address and your correct password and click next. it will look for settings and fail.

Once you get to the unable to detect your settings, manually edit the entries in the dialog as shown below. Remember to put your OWA signon in to the box at the bottom.

When you click the Re-test button, Thunderbird will show it has found your account settings and proceeds to allow you to create the account.

You are done, you have your Exchange/OWA account in Thunderbird. You can now add calendars and address books as shown on the MailDav web site.

 For those using Linux there are instructions on UBUNTU here 

ExQuilla

The ExQuilla add-on supports Microsoft Exchange 2007 and later and is now available in Beta from the Mozilla Addon site. When used in conjunction with the Exchange calender provider for lightning  most Exchange features are available directly within Thunderbird

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How do I Recall my Email.

This is one of those posts that really has no solution, but it is a question that is asked over and over again.

Email has no option to recall once it is send. So you can not put the cat back in the bag once it is let out.

Microsoft Exchange email server has an option to Recall an email, and this has led many people who work in corporate environments to think that it is a feature of email.  This is a feature of Exchange server, not email and there is a big difference.  Exchange can basically do what it likes, because all the mail in in the exchange database.  Once it leaves that exchange database and going out into the wild of the internet it is no longer under the control of the exchange server and can not be recalled at all. If the mail has been seen by the person it was sent to the recall does not work If the email is send outside the domain (that is to someone outside your business, the recall will not work.  For the full details you might read what Microsoft has to say about how their recall implementation works.

Google built a recall into their Gmail system as well, but again it is a fudge.  They simply delay the sending of the email for the time they give you to change your mind;.  So you get an undo option on the send, but it is not a real recall as the mail was never sent.

So Thunderbird does not have a recall option, simply becasue it is not a part of the mail RFC's which are the core of Thunderbird functionality.  So for those that want a similar option to change their mind, there is the send latter addon, which delays sending and provides the opportunity to change your mind and delete mail from the outbox before it is sent. 

But by far the simplest method is to make Thunderbird work off line (File > offline > work offline)  this means all messages will be stored locally and not sent until you repeat the process to go back on line, or press the get mail button.

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Can't delete EML files

This came up on the get satisfaction support site, and I thought it worth noting here for my own future reference.

Apparently windows search uses some sort of modified file properties to 'enhance the search experience'.  The references I have read all implicate Live mail in the installation of this enhancement, but it could just as well be a windows update or an Internet explorer update.

The side effect of the enhanced search experience is that any EML files you have saved into the file system from your mail client can't be dealt with as files and nothing you do to move or delete them works.  The solution is to change the registry key as shown below.   Once that key is set to Zero and you have rebooted you will be able to modify the EML files as normal.

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{5FA29220-36A1-40f9-89C6-F4B384B7642E}\OverrideFileSystemProperties]
"System.SFGAOFlags"=dword:00000000

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Folders can be confusing

The folders view in Thunderbird appear to cause some confusion, partly because of the may views available, and partly because the behaviour is different depending on where you create folders.

Thunderbird folder can be broadly separated into two groups.

IMAP folders and Local folders


IMAP folders are folder that are created within an IMAP mail account.  These folders are the same as those shown when you log into the server and are replicated with the server.  These folders must follow the limits and restrictions imposed by the server.  All IMAP server are not created equal, some have what appear to be rather strange restrictions on where a folder can and can not be created, and these restrictions are often times contradictory from one Server software package to another.

While we never really think about the program on the server we connect to to get our mail it does have relevance when creating folders for IMAP accounts.   Things like , there appears to be a 40 character limit in Gmail to total folder names, including parents.  On Other servers all folders have to be children of the inbox, other limit folder which have child folder to not actually containing mail.

These limits actually cause some problems as Thunderbird often does not know they exist and therefore will allow you to create a folder, which disappears almost immediately as it tries to replicate it to the server and fails.


Local folders

As the name implies, these folder are local to your computer.  They are not available if you access you mail account from a web browser, as mail in them is saved on the hard disk of your computer.

Thunderbirds local folders do not suffer from the limitations imposed by IMAP servers. You can have as many of them as you like and there can have as many levels as you need.  The total content of each local folder is currently limited to 4Gb of mail and attachments, but that is the only real limitation other than disk space on your computer.  This is also a good place to store your archive folder, as it frees space on your IMAP mail account.  While this is not all that relevant to Gmail users with their Gigabytes of storage, many mail server offer relatively small IMAP storage quotas and saving or archiving to local folders is a way to free space on the server while retaining a copy of the mail.

If a folder simply can't be foound, if you enter the following code into the error console in the Tools menu and click evaluate the entire folder tree will be opened out so that you can look without having to click a million time to open the folder.

Components.classes['@mozilla.org/appshell/window-mediator;1'].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIWindowMediator).getMostRecentWindow("mail:3pane").gFolderTreeView.mode= "all"

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Contact Pane

One of the most frequently asked questions about Thunderbird's compose window is the contact pane.  Mysteriously it disappears. Usually this is because you have pressed the F9 key and turned it off.  The setting is to be found on the View menu as 'contact pane' and pressing F9 toggles it on and off.

The other cause is far less obvious, and that is it has been dragged to the far left of the window until the width is Zero.  Recovery from this requires a bit of fiddling with the mouse over on the left centre of the screen to locate the now basically hidden divider and dragging it back to a visible location.  The mail tweaks add-on contains an option to make these dividers flash when you move the mouse over them to make this process easier, but at the time of writing this the add-on had not been updated to support Version 6.

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XPI files:- Or how to install an add-on in Thunderbird.

The release of the new add-on manager in Thunderbird 5.0 has demonstrated that many people are not comfortable installing an add-on in Thunderbird, a part of this is the fact that the process of installing from a file is far from intuitive,  there are no associations for the file and double clicking it get the standard dumb answer from the operating system asking what to do with this odd unknown file type.

The second problem people encounter is that Firefox uses exactly the same XPI file format, so if you browsing in Firefox, simply clicking on an XPI link on the web prompts the file to be installed in Firefox.  It is for this reason that almost all download sites display a message similar to this one.

Add-ons in Thunderbird can not only be simple, they are the core of what makes these Mozilla Applications fit for the needs of almost anyone.  There are hundreds of add-ons for almost every conceivable niche function but they are greatly underused simply because people either don't know they exist, or are put off by the whole process of installing them.

Add-ons can change the theme (or skin) to introduce more colourful icons etc. or they can add functionality.  To get the full scope, take your browser here and explore the categories shown on the left of the page.  These are only the add-ons hosted on the Mozilla add-on site.  You will also find many other add-ons, which are not on the site but references in support forums or Blogs such as this.  One personal web site that contains a whole host of useful add-ons is KAOSMOS WEBSITE

There are two ways to install an add-on.and I will talk about the simplest first.

Go to the add-on manager.  You will find this on the tools menu.   It opens a new tab, which in my case flickers several times when it is opened.  From here you are presented with a screen offering some of the more popular themes and add-ons.  There is also a search box, and a hidden menu, and it is this that is the most useful part of the process. In the search box type in the name of the add-on you want to install and it will locate it (sometimes) and list it with an install button.  Nothing could be simpler.

The second and far more common approach is to install an add-on from a downloaded file. There are two main reasons for this.  People link to add-ons on the web, and most of us use a browser to find out about things.  Your browser will download the file, but as I said earlier there will be no help from the operating system in installing the file into Thunderbird.  It is assumed that if you downloaded the file you know what to do with it.

So what to do.  Again it is simple, but only once you know how to do it.

In the addon manager there is that hidden menu I refered to before and it is using this menu that you install your XPI file to Thunderbird

I am not sure what to call this wheel thingy, because while it looks like a wheel in Windows, and on a Mac it has a very different appearance on Linux.

Regardless of the name it is the tools menu for the add-on manager and it is the 'Install from file' entry on that menu that most people installing an add-on will be using. Once you have located the menu, clicking install, pointing the file dialog that opens to your downloaded file is about as simple as opening a word processing document.  There will be a short delay once you click install, and a counter will display on the install button. This is to give you a short time to change your mind, and make it hard for malicious sites to install add-ons without your express permission.

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Deleting an account Thunderbird

This is an often asked question in Thunderbird support forums, and one that whilst easy to accomplish, is fraught with unexpected consequences.

Why you should be very careful in deleting accounts.

Thunderbird links messages to IMAP accounts.  If you delete an account, the messages associated with that account will simply vanish.  It may be possible to recover these messages, but it is certainly not something one would elect to do through choice. So the short of it is that if you have messages you want to keep, you don't really want to delete the account.  You might want to disable the account from checking mail, you might also want to remove the outgoing server from Thunderbird, but you don't want to delete the account.

Why you might think your need to delete an account

It is not working, or has stopped working. 
This is not Outlook Express where the answer to all problems is delete and recreate, or uninstall and reinstall.  Neither approach is likely to fix the vast majority of problems, but is highly likely to loose your mail in the process.  If you are having problems with an account that does not work, post your settings, there are shown in Trouble shooting on the help menu at the Thunderbird support site with a clear statement including the actual error messages you are receiving.

You have closed the account with the provider
As mentioned earlier Thunderbird will more than likely delete you mail along with the account, so you need to keep the account in Thunderbird, even if you exclude it from mail checking.

Disable the account from checking mails, by Going to Tools > Account settings > server settings and turning of the Check for new messages on startup and Check for new messages ever XX minutes. then click the advanced button and uncheck the include this server when checking mail if it is available.

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