blog.crox.net

For years the default behaviour in Thunderbird had been to forward e-mails as attachments, but at some point it was changed to "inline". You can still manually choose how you'd like to transfer a message by going to "Message" -> "Forward as", but I couldn't find a way to set the default in the preferences.

There is, however, a way to change it without messing with manual edit of config files. Go to "Preferences" -> "Advanced" -> "Config Editor...", and look for "mail.forward_message_mode". 0 is for "attached", 2 is for "inline".

Lightning is a Thunderbird plug-in that adds calendar functions. More on the mozilla.org page. I tried to install the .xpi from there, but it failed with the following error message:

"Lightning" could not be installed because it is not compatible with your Thunderbird build type (Linux_x86_64-gcc3). Please contact the author of this item about the problem.

So I downloaded the source from this page, and followed the instructions from here. This page and the link to that one were also helpful.

In case you don't want to open all those links, I've put the resulting .xpi file here for you to download: lightning-0.3.1-x86_64.xpi. Or if you prefer to build it yourself, here is how I did it:

[untar/bz, cd mozilla]
make distclean
export CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe -fPIC"
export CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
export CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
export MAKEOPTS="-j3"
ac_cv_visibility_pragma=no ./configure --enable-application=mail --enable-extensions=default,lightning
make

(of course you may want to change some stuff to better suit your system, I've got a Core 2 Duo laptop running Gentoo Linux)

Then just select Tools > Extensions in Thunderbird and install the lightning.xpi you've just built (located in dist/xpi-stage/lightning.xpi).


UPDATE - 2007-06-28 - Lightning 0.5

After reading Matthew's comment I downloaded the newly released Lightning 0.5 from here, and built lightning-0.5-x86_64.xpi following the exact same procedure that I used for 0.3.1. Then I installed it from Tools > Extensions, restarted Thunderbird and immediately noticed the different appearance. (I did not uninstall 0.3.1 first, which apparently is ok.)

UPDATE - 2008-09-28 - Lightning 0.9

Download from http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/0.9/contrib/linux-x86_64/

For years I've been annoyed by the habit thunderbird has to set "Content-Disposition: inline" when you attach a text file to an outgoing e-mail.

Experimenting with our mail to fax gateway, I finally took the time to fix it today. As with some other "advanced" settings in Fireforx/Thunderbird, there is an option you can set to achieve the (imho) correct behavior, but no GUI dialog for it.

So in order to have outgoing text files attached with "Content-Disposition: attachment", you need to set mail.content_disposition_type to 1 (default is 0). You can do this by going to "Edit" -> "Preferences" -> "Advanced" -> "Config Editor". (Using the windows version it's probably "Tools" -> "Options" -> etc.)