Monday, August 14, 2006

Configuring Mozilla Thunderbird to work with .Mac Mail's Trash Folder

I use Mozilla Thunderbird on my work PC to check my .Mac Mail account. All in all, it's a good program, with one nagging problem with .Mac, the trash folder name expected by Thunderbird is Trash, but .Mac's trash folder name is Deleted Messages. I have basically been living with this problem for years by configuring Thunderbird to "mark message as deleted" and "expunge on exit" combination, but it's sub-optimal since messages that get moved remain in your Inbox folder until you exit, although marked for deletion. I kept thinking this would get "fixed" in a newer release, or at least the ability to change the name of the Trash folder. After reading through the lengthy Thunderbird 2.0 Alpha 1 changlog and not seeing any mention of this specific issue, I went looking in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base, which I never thought may have existed and I never googled on this issue because it is obvious in the UI changing the name of the folder Thunderbird uses for Trash is not possible. But it is! You just have to know how to create a user.js file in your profile folder with the right command. The instructions are at MozillaZine KB - IMAP Trash Folder.