Thunderbird and Firefox Tips and Tricks

Thunderbird and Firefox are very flexible and configurable. Both can be configured and extended in several ways. As time goes by I will add tips and tricks to this page so others can take advantage of what I have discovered.

Thunderbird Tips & Tricks

Jan. 29, 2005 – Attachment Pane (PAIN)

Thunderbird puts a window or pane at the bottom of the application window when a message contains attachments. Unlike Mozilla which hid the window by default and showed a little icon that you could click to see all of the attachments, Thunderbird keeps the attachment pane visible all of the time. Worse yet if you have a lot of attachments the window grows and grows until this is almost no room left for the message you want to read.

I found this behavior very annoying as on of the mailing lists I subscribe to (SANS DShield) sends the combined daily list as a message with attachments. With 20 or 30 articles you don't have any message area left.

I Google searched all over for an answer but found none. Because both Thunderbird and Firefox are Open Source and because both use an extension language to create the visual environment I was able to look at the mail.jar in the distribution and find out what the attachment area was called -- that is what the ID was.

I found that the area had the ID "attachmentView". I decided to fix my problem by modifying the userChrome.css file which is located in ~/.thunderbird/default/xxx.slt/chrome (note: xxx is a random value created by Thunderbird). This file may or may not be in the chrome directory. If it isn't there you can create it. I added the following code:

#attachmentView {
	font-size: 8pt !important;
	height: 80px !important;
	overflow: scroll !important;
}

After making the modification shutdown Thunderbird and restart it. The code creates a pane only 80 pixeles height and forces the text to be a small eight point. If there is more than 80 pixeles of attachments a scroll bar is attached so you can scroll through the list. This works quite well for me.

Firefox Tips & Tricks

Jan 29, 2005 – Helpfull Links

• Web Developer 0.9.2
  This is a must have Extension if you develop web pages.
• Info about userContent.css
  This is a WiKi that describes the use of the "userContent.css"

If you haven't found it yet, open the "Tools" menu bar item and select "Extensions". There are a number of quite nice extensions that do everything from calendering to user agent switching. Try them out.

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