• Email
• Clients
• Thunderbird

Thunderbird refuses to start

rm ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/*/lock
rm ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/*/.parentlock

Nice. Easy to use. NOT.

Thunderbird! Let go of your HTML fetish!

Under account settings, composition and addressing, uncheck "Compose messages in HTML format"

There's also some stuff under "Edit, Preferences, Composition, Send and HTML options". Buggered if I know what it's meant to do, but it doesn't seem to work.

Don't not munge inline text emails (e.g. patches)

(link to original LKML discussion)

DISCLAIMER: I gave up doing this. It's too ugly. I just attach stuff, and it seems to encode fine as text, and everybody is happy.

OK, so Thunderbird is written by aged whore monkeys stoned on crack. It loves to eat your email formatting for breakfast, likes 3D-gourad shaded fonts with M&M's on, and won't leave your frigging text alone.

• You have no "insert file option" so you're going to have to cut and paste. Ewww. The least revolting way to do this is to use xclip ("xclip < my_patch"). Cut and paste doesn't work from xterm (line-wrap and tabs->spaces), from emacs it does seem to work.

• xclip doesn't work for some people/on some distros. You can also use an editor that supports copy-and-paste.

• Edit your Thunderbird config settings to tell it not to wrap lines:
  

  • user_pref("mailnews.wraplength", 0);

• Edit your Thunderbird config settings so that it won't use format=flowed:
  

  • user_pref("mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed", false);
• You need to get Thunderbird into preformat mode.
  • If you compose HTML messages by default, it's not too hard (but you should kill yourself). Just select "Preformat" from the drop-down box just under the subject line.
  • If you compose in text by default, you have to tell it to compose a new message in HTML (just as a one-off), and then force it from there back to text, else it will wrap lines. Yes, I know - stupidest crap ever. So shift-click on the Write icon to compose to get HTML compose mode, then select "Preformat" from the drop-down box just under the subject line. Someone needs to kill the idiots who did that.

Using an external editor in Thunderbird

Per Tejun Heo / Mark Lord.

There is an "External Editor" extension for Thunderbird, which turns out to be the only really sane way to submit patches with that client.

Download and install it, then add a button for it using View->Toolbars->Customize... and finally just click on it when in the Compose dialog.