I use Thunderbird to get mail via IMAP to the Exchange server. Now, Exchange is a weird beast, and I am not a Windows guy, so there’s a problem. Outlook lets you create rules (aka filters) that can run on the server or the client. I set up rules on the server using Outlook originally, and figured it was easier to do it on the server since I use Thunderbird in at least 3 or 4 places, and didn’t feel like making filters for each copy of Thunderbird.
So in typical Microsoft fashion, things don’t work. As I added more rules via Outlook, they were not working. I finally mention this to an ex-Windows guy, and he tells me there’s some limit to how many filters can be created on the server. Argh! You think Outlook would tell you this! But no… and it’s not like I’ve got hundreds of rules, it’s really not that many…
That’s ok, we can work around that. Filters in Thunderbird are fairly easy to create, though I’d still like to see a text file I can edit, like the the mailViews.dat file does for views. (Any idea where the filters are stored?)
As long as we’re talking about views, those things in the little drop-down menu, they are easy to create, and if you want to copy from one machine to another, find the file named ‘mailViews.dat’ in your profile folder. You can even reorder them so they appear in the filter menu the way you like.
Oh, the format is pretty simple, I would think it would be easy to share views quite easily:
name="Has Attachments" enabled="no" type="1" condition="AND (has attachment status,is,true)"
A far cry from mork indeed!
Ok, you want one more file to mess with? Then try ‘persdict.dat’ which holds the words you’ve added to the dictionary when doing spell checks. You know, words like “diff”, “grep”, and “wiki” – ok, that’s it for today’s Thunderbird hackery…