delete thunderbird archives folder 15. Dec 2009
I just upgraded to Thunderbird 3. Things seem to be a little speedier now, which feels quite nice. The only pitfall i experienced was the new archive feature. I tried it out, just to see what happens. Just for the record, I am using the IMAP protocol for managing my mails. So I selected a mail and pressed a to archive it. Thunderbird created an Archives folder with a subfolder named after the year of the mail. Okay, I thought, this is nice but not so exciting since I don’t want to decide on every mail if I want to keep it or not. So I thought I’d delete the Archives folder and just ignore the feature. Since I was too lazy to reach my keyboard I wanted to do it via the context menu. On every regular folder you have an option in the context menu to delete it (see screenshot). Unfortunately this menu item is missing in the context menu of the Archives folder. Most likely because the Thunderbird developers fear that the average joe might unintentionally delete all the mails in his precious archive. Okay, here are the good news. They weren’t consequent. After about a half an hour of unnecessary fiddling around I found a convingly simple solution. If you reach for you keyboard you can simply press backspace or delete and Thunderbird will ask you to verify the deletion of Archives. Boohay! After deletion, the folder stays gone as long as you don’t use the archive function. I hope they don’t fix this “bug”, meaning I hope they don’t remove the ability to delete the Archives folder via keyboard. By the way, is there any common word in english or german for property of a program which the developer sees as a bug, but the user as a feature? I mean there certainly must be a word for the opposite, meaning an official feature which feels more like a bug to the user, but I don’t remember it.
bad request to google cache 19. Jun 2009
Those who use Safari 3 on Mac OX 10.5 Leopard might have experienced problems when using the cache functionality of the Google search. After some weeks of Safari usage suddenly all Google cache pages lead to the following error message.
Bad Request - Your client has issued a malformed or illegal request.
Clearing Safaris cache doesn’t help. Searching for google in the cookie list and deleting all hits doesn’t help. What does help is deleting all cookies. This of course is a very cumbersome solution since now you have to login again on all your websites and you lose all your preferences. To avoid this you can simply delete all cookie list entries corresponding to the ip adress displayed in the address bar when looking at the google cache error page. Be careful to press Remove and not Remove all since the latter wipes out all cookies even those that are not marked. So in my case I’d simply search for 209.85.129.132 and delete all hits.
Booyah, this solves the problem!
songbird needs a cd ripper 15. Mar 2009
I have a collection of about 800 CDs which I will eventually be ripping into a lossless format, as laptop harddisks reach a reasonable size. Currently I usually buy 5 CDs a month which I rip into my iTunes. I prefer buying CDs over buying MP3/AAC-Downloads, as they provide better value for the money from my point of view. Songbird would definitely need this feature for me to switch over, as I want an integrated solution for ripping.
If you also share the opinion, that Songbird should have an integrated cd ripper, than you should tell the songbird folks. It seems they actually read the stuff that’s written there. It’s probably best to reply directly to Rob Lord’s comment, as he will probably be notified if his comment receives replies. If you have further suggestitions on the implementation you can write a comment on the bug tracker.
quote of the day 22. Feb 2009
The purpose of Ruby is to maximize programming pleasure (Matz)
remove extra spacing in thunderbird 05. Jan 2009
Thunderbird displays nasty extra spacing above and below quotes in the compose window. This lures the author into thinking his mail is nicely spaced, but in reality it isn’t. What looks nice on the senders side looks totally cramped on the recipients side.
Here is a simple demonstration.
The compose window normally looks like this.
There are no blank lines inserted whatsoever, the spacing comes solely from Thunderbirds misleading stylesheet. The awful awakening comes, when recipient of the mail opens it in his mail client.
Pretty ugly, huh? Okay if you think this is bad, then take a look at how it looks in a webmailer.
Illegible! Terrible! No one wants to read mails that look like that. Now let’s apply a little patch. The compose window without blank lines now looks like this.
Looks bad? Great, that’s what it’s supposed to! What you see there is a much more realistic preview of the mail. This ugly looking mail now drives you into inserting blank lines which is exactly what you should be doing. After inserting the blank lines the compose window looks like this.
The recipient now sees this.
Much better! Reading is no longer a pain. Now see how the webmailer displays the mail.
Wonderful! Beautiful! The way it always should have been. No more ugly illegible mails!
To remove the nasty extra spacing above and below quotes in Thunderbird’s compose window just insert the following snippet into your userContent.css.
blockquote[type=cite] {
margin-top: 0 !important;
margin-bottom: 0 !important;
}
blockquote pre {
margin-top: 0 !important;
margin-bottom: 0 !important;
}
For more background information read the posting on Mozillazine. Interestingly this problem persists since at least five years but no one in the Mozilla team has seemed to care about fixing it.
