Tag Archives: thunderbird

Browse remote shares in non-GVFS aware apps

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GNOME uses a virtual file system to mount remote shares, like Samba and NFS. The shares appear in any GNOME-based GVFS aware application (and those that use Nautilus as the file chooser), but with others like Thunderbird they do not. Someone on the Fedora list recently needed to attach a file from a remote share, but couldn’t.

I then discovered (thanks to a knowledgeable responder) that you can browse to these shares directly (no need to manually mount them) via the hidden .gvfs directory in your home, which means that if you access them no-matter what program you’re using (yes, even KDE apps), i.e.

/home/chris/.gvfs/GVFSShareName/path/to/your/file

Very handy!

openSUSE 11.2 web links don’t work in Thunderbird under KDE fix

My mum’s machine runs openSUSE 11.2, with KDE 4. She continues to use Thunderbird as her mail client as it is familiar. Naturally she also uses Firefox for web browsing.

Unfortunately, web links don’t seem to work which is rather annoying. Firefox is set as the default web client, as is thunderbird for email. My guess is that Thunderbird is looking for some GNOME configuration on what to do. I tried adding some custom handler arguements in Thunderbird’s config (like about:config in Firefox), but that didn’t work.

In the end, the simple fix was to use gconftool to set the appropriate parameters:
gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command '/usr/bin/firefox %s' --type String

gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/https/command '/usr/bin/firefox %s' --type String

Restart Thunderbird and all is good!

Code from French Military used in Thunderbird 3

The French Military switched to free software in 2007 and has developed an extension for Thunderbird called “TrustedBird” which is co-branded with Mozilla and used in the recent Thunderbird 3.

The military found Mozilla’s open source design permitted France to build security extensions, while Microsoft’s secret, proprietary software allowed no tinkering…

The military uses Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail software and in some cases the Trustedbird extension on 80,000 computers and it has spread to the ministries of Finance, Interior and Culture.

With the French Police having switched to Ubuntu, it looks like the Government as a whole is migrating that way also.

Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 out soon

Marco Zehe writes that Thunderbird 3.0 will be out soon.

While four main issues remain, there have been lots of improvements, especially in the area of accessibility. Firefox has certainly stolen the show over the last number of years, so it’s great to see Thunderbird getting some love!