Questions

Discussion of general topics about Mozilla Thunderbird
Post Reply
Chrysalis
Posts: 319
Joined: January 27th, 2004, 10:43 am

Questions

Post by Chrysalis »

Hi guys.

I have migrated to thunderbird from outlook, many things I like, but a few annoyances (not show stoppers tho).

If anyone has an answer to thes questions it be appreciated.

1 - Is there a way to make an a/v scan attachments even if just e.g. if its interactive only without opening the attachment? I have pestered eset as they dont have a thunderbird plugin, but I have now hardened server side malware protection to compensate for the lack of eset scanning, and I host all my email accounts on my own servers so I was able to do that.
2 - Is there a way to make manual use of "get messages" work whilst staying in offline mode? My reason is that I want to use offline/online mode as a flip switch for automated mail downloading (check every 10 minutes), but I dont want to put it in online mode to manually check for email, the same way as outlook behaves.
3 - Is there a 64bit version of thunderbird for windows that is up to date v45? not the palemoon variant which seems 2 years out of date.
4 - Is there a way to add a offline button to the main toolbar?

These would satisfy all my niggles, thunderbird does seem laggy tho, not sure why. I am using maildir which I am happy with, my outlook mailbox format was one massive 2+ gig file that used up loads of i/o and kept getting corrupt.
User avatar
DanRaisch
Moderator
Posts: 127186
Joined: September 23rd, 2004, 8:57 pm
Location: Somewhere on the right coast

Re: Questions

Post by DanRaisch »

3. Palemoon is not a variant of the Thunderbird email client but of Firefox, the web browser. There is no official 64bit version of Thunderbird for Windows OS.

4. In the bottom bar of the main Thunderbird window is a small icon of two monitors. Clicking that icon toggles Thunderbird between on-line and off-line mode.
User avatar
tanstaafl
Moderator
Posts: 49647
Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm

Re: Questions

Post by tanstaafl »

1. I use BitDefender as my AV. It does not know about email, but will automatically scan that attachment when its opened because that actually opens a file.

Thunderbird normally opens attachments by saving them as a temporary file and spawning a command line to launch some utility to view the attachment. It passes the location of the temporary file as a command line argument. When that file is opened your anti-virus scanner should automatically scan it, unless you've explicitly disabled that service. As long as you configure Thunderbird (or Windows, and Thunderbird inherits those defaults) to use a different program to view an attachment you should be okay.

2. You can't use a feature that contacts something over the Internet while configured to disable all network access. If you were running Linux and used a MovMail account that fetched mail from a spooler directory (whose contents were downloaded using a procmail/fetchmail program beforehand) that might be a different story. However, I assume you're using a normal POP or IMAP account since you're using Windows.

3 Fossamail at https://www.fossamail.org/ is a palemoon equivalent of Thunderbird. They have x64 builds that were built last week. Their version numbering seems to be based on the corresponding Palemoon backend, not the corresponding Thunderbird version. So version 25.2.3 might be equivalent to Thunderbird 45.*. The best way to find out is to install it and look at its features.

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/64_bit_builds . It mentions "This updated blog post benchmarks 32 and 64 bit versions of Firefox, including Waterfox (specifically compiled for 64-bit) and concludes that "We should see some performance improvements in the future, but Firefox 64-bit doesn’t appear to give you a faster browsing experience at this time." This Ghacks article compares 32 and 64 bit versions of popular browsers and concludes "Most differences are marginal and not visible to the user. " " I'd assume the same is true for Thunderbird.
Chrysalis
Posts: 319
Joined: January 27th, 2004, 10:43 am

Re: Questions

Post by Chrysalis »

Dan palemoon made a fork of thunderbird compiled as 64bit, thats what I meant. But that fork is a couple of years old as they abandoned it.

tanstaafi yeah I know they would be detected when opening but ideally want them scanned when they are downloaded, rather than sitting in my inbox unscanned. I am using maildir tho so its possible that writes attachments as seperate files anyway which would mean scanned when written to disk.

For the online/offline mode, its partially not so bad now as I discovered I Can quick toggle by clicking on the icon in the bottom left, plus that icon is much better using the custom theme I have on now.

Ahh ok on fossamail so it is not abandoned but is based on a quite old version of thunderbird so I probably will not use.

I dont want a 64bit build for performance reasons, I want it for security reasons, 64bit binaries have native ASLR, DEP etc. Plus windows security framework newest features only harden 64bit binaries and libraries, 32bit is almost obsolete.

Although I should note on firefox 64bit is most definitely faster when many tabs are open.

Good news also is I resolved the laggyness, was a extension which made spawned mail windows take about half a second to appear, decided dont need that extension so the laggyness is gone now.

There is a new niggle I cannot fix tho.

In outlook RSS feed messages from zdnet are text based and have a link to the news article if wan tto view in browser. It seems with thunderbird I can either load these as basic summary messages (adjusting an option in config editor as gui option is broken), but when I do this the link to the web page is missing. Or I can have thunderbird load the web page itself in the message, very bad do not want to do this, i t is the default thunderbird behaviour. I cannot make it do what outlook does which is just load the summary "and" show the link to the news article. This is only an issue on zdnet feeds tho, other feeds seem to behave the same as outlook when the config editor setting to load as summary is configured.
Post Reply