I am not a huge plugin junkie espically with mail clients. One however I have found invaluable is Nostalgy. It basically allows to you dictate where a message is saved by the folder it is found in and/or who it was set from/to. For those of use that check email in multiple boxes this is handy so you can assign a action depending if you are home or work.

Imagine my distaste when I found that when I upgraded to Fedora 11 that the version of Thunderbird (in beta at the moment) is not supported. Now all the xpi type plugins have a file called install.rdf that contains the tag em:maxVersion that you can adjust. Simply unzip the file into a temp directory, change the file and rezip it. Then point Thunderbird to it locally to install it. I did that and was able to install it.

That was several weeks ago and it has not given me any problems. Now keep in mind, There is no magic here. In essence I have short circuited the version check rest assured it is the same code as the 2.x version, for better or worse. So this could cause issues so do not blame the author of the plugin or me for suggesting it. If you are lazy you can grab the one I modified. Remember do not blame me if it moves all your email to a bitbucket.

Well for those of us that run Fedora may have noticed that the version of Thunderbird that ships with Fedora 11 is 3.0 which is in beta at the moment.

One of the changes that was implemented was Tabs. When you open a message the default behavior is a new tab is opened, works nicely.

Now the problem. When I open a message and close it the inbox tab now has a "copy" of the message and I am unable to get to my real inbox I basically have to restart it. My tempory work-around was to oppsite mouse click on the message and select "open in new window". The kicker is that somehow only my home machine had this issue while my desktop and laptop(s) did not, they work fine. All machines were at the same version and patched. Having one workstation working differently than the rest made it very fustrating remembering to use the workaround when at home. I was unable to find a configurable way to make open a new window the default. Like most of mozilla's projects I am sure there is a way I just did not spend enough time to figure it out.

I assumed that if I deleted my .thunderbird directory and re-setup the problem would go away. So when I had a spare moment I (thankfully) moved my .thunderbird out of the way and resetup. Unfortunately, that did not work either. I have duduced that the problem creeped into Fedora after the initial release since my work machine was installed first and my home workstation was one of the last ones to be installed. So much for my soulition. I guess I was gonna actully do some research for this instead of the broad sword approack I have to get a scapel.

So after some searching I found the report of a bug that sounded like my issue. It suggested that simpily deleting the localstore.rdf file and starting it up. Well that fixed my issue and so far I have not had any more issues.

Other than that I am quite happy with Thunderbird 3. I am not sure that tabs is a requirement like it has become on browsers but it may become addicting.