Thunderbird preferences

[Jaime Davila]

Peter N. Spotts wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-06-09 at 10:43 -0400, frank mccormick wrote:
>> I am thinking of switching to Thunderbird and wonder where in T'bird is 
>> the user preference for a browser set. When I click on a URL in a 
>> message, nothing happens. Starting T'bird from a shell I get the error 
>> message " no running window found" but no indication of what browser 
>> it's looking for.
>>
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Frank
>>
> 
> Frank,
> 
> Use gnome-default-applications-properties to ensure thunderbird is set
> as your default email client and whatever your browser is for browser
> (firefox?) It looks like TB assumes you already have your browser
> activated. So make sure your browser is running before you try to
> activate a link in an email. Assuming you use firefox, an alternative is
> to use the following script (copy it into a text file and make it
> executable) and use it as your "browser" in the
> gnome-default-applications... settings.
> 
> #!/bin/sh
> # firefox-open.sh
> if firefox -remote 'ping()' 2> /dev/null ; then
>         exec firefox -remote "openurl($1, new-tab)"
> else
>         exec firefox "$1"
> fi
> 
> When you name the file, give it a .sh at the end, then do chmod a+rwx
> filename.sh
> 
> In theory, anyway, this should activate firefox whether it's already
> running or not.
> 
> Hope this helps...
> 
> Pete


While I've seen scripts that take care of this type of thing, you can 
tell thunderbird directly. One of the advantages of doing it directly is 
that it will work regardless of which desktop manager you use (i.e. if 
you switch from gnome to kde, or vice versa, or to some other option 
available now or in the future).

To tell thunderbird directly, you will need to edit your preferences, 
which are stored in your profile's pref.js file. To find this file, go 
to .thunderbird, and then to a "default" directory with some sort of 
random name. for example, in my system it's 5q0blabla.default. In side 
that directory you'll find a pref.js file. Exit thunderbird, and then do 
the following:

Open that file with your favorite text editor, and add the following two 
lines:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/usr/bin/firefox");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.https", "/usr/bin/firefox");

This assumes firefox is in your /usr/bin directory, but that's a safe bet.

If lines about network.protocol-handler.app.http and 
network.protocol-handler.app.https are already there, change them to the 
ones above.

I'm not sure how comfortable you are with using the terminal, but if the 
above instructions don' t make sense, just email me back and I'll 
explain further.

-- 

******************************************************
Jaime J. Davila
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Hampshire College
School of Cognitive Science
jdavila at hampshire dot edu
http://helios.hampshire.edu/jdavila
*******************************************************