Episode: 3308
Title: HPR3308: let's talk about Thunderbird
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3308/hpr3308.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 20:33:22

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3308 for Wednesday, the 7th of April 2021.
Today's show is entitled Let's Talk About Thunderbird.
It is hosted by some guy on the internet and is about 33 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is using Thunderbird to manage emails.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I am your host, some guy on the internet and today I'm going to talk to you guys about email.
At the end of my or not at the end of the last episode but somewhere in the show notes I think I
probably said I do a video on email or not a video podcast on email and you know when you say
you're going to do a show you got to provide a show. So here we go we're providing a show on email.
Now obviously I'm not a highly technical person but I do believe I've got some things that
might help some people and even if it doesn't if these are things you automatically know how to do
or whatever then I guess just enjoy the show you know it's content and that's what we're here for
so let's get started. So first thing first the program I use to manage email is Thunderbird.
So if you're doing email in the browser and you'd like to you know use a program to manage your
email where that way you can you know manage it offline you don't always have to have the internet
to you know go through all your emails or whatever I recommend Thunderbird it's really good it's
free and open source software I made a donation to them not too long ago I think like 20 bucks
I got to make another donation to them as well because I like to keep projects like this around I
mean that you know I know my little 20 bucks is nothing compared to what some major organization
may provide but that's that's that's still appreciation coming from the users you know showing
that look we need this software and I'm gonna keep keep showing that I need this software so I'm
gonna make another more than like this can be another 20 bucks that I donate until I can actually
get financially stable enough to do like an automatic recurring payment thing I really in my last
episode I talked about that account thing where we just sort of you know make a one donation and
the money is automatically I wish that would be a little bit easier crap now here I go rambling on
about something completely the usual huh let's all right let's stay focused so once you got
your Thunderbird loaded up and you got your your accounts loaded into Thunderbird you know you
get a login to your accounts verify that it choose set up to if you want to anyway keep your
password stored so that way automatically when you load Thunderbird automatically pulls down new
emails and things and you don't have to login each and every time so I have multiple email accounts
under Thunderbird and one of the things I thought of in the past to do to help cut down on some
of the spam because like when you're shopping at different stores and things they all want you to
provide an email address and you know tons of spam I was gonna create an email address specifically
for the spam to get dumped into and I saw that one of my accounts under Yahoo has this capability
for you to it it's kind of weird setting that up where you can have like this sort of temporary
email account that you create under your main email account and that temporary one is what you
give out whenever you know what's gonna be a bunch of like if a store has hey which like without
email you give them that one instead of your main but what I find is once you start using Thunderbird
appropriately there's no need for any of that there there really isn't I mean Thunderbird just
handles it all for you I mean you can do the smart filtering which will automatically detect
certain emails as spam for you and move them to the bulk email and you can work with that
so that over time it gets smarter and smarter and automatically detects the spam or you can do
like I do and just work with filters I like to manually do it myself personally I like to go
on there and select the thing I really know as spam and you know copy that address put it into
a filter have that filter automatically before the junk processing automatically pull anything from
that domain and I just highlight the domains not just the specific address sometimes it's this
specific address depending on where it's coming from but yeah I like the domain in the filter
and then have that domain automatically dumped into the bulk mail I guess folder directory whatever
it is here and I like to do that instead of deleting it immediately because sometimes errors may
and I like the idea that I can go back and check through bulk mail and ensure that okay I did not
accidentally put something in there that I really need it so bulk mail is like that you know last
chance before it's deleted forever so yeah that's that's what I do for that now setting up your filters
you're gonna probably is some of you may not know how to do this let's go ahead and click on this
bad boy right here once you got your email logged in and your emails are pulling down or whatever
you want to set up a filter you can just hit old on the keyboard now to pull up your menu bar at the
top if you don't already have that because depending like if you using a bunch to it may not have the
menu at the top you'll just have the hamburger menu which is on the top right the three little lines
if you don't know what a hamburger menu is it like three horizontal lines stacked on top of each
other but if you hit old it'll pull up your menu with the file edit view etc I'm on Linux meant
sentiment this is my production machine that I'm on I'm not on the laptop that I did show about a
few weeks back but here we go let's go ahead and jump on in here we're gonna click on tools and
then we're gonna screw down to message filters so if you wanted to you can hit old that'll pull up
the menu then you can hit T which is has the little underscore under T showing you with the hot
keys that you can hit there and then you can hit F I should have probably did the NATO alphabet
thing so old T is in tango F as in fox trot and that'll pull up your tools menu so now that you've
got your tools menu up you can go ahead and just hit new to create a new filter and when you do
that I'm not going to create a new one right now and I'm just going to go under one of my existing
ones but when you create a new one another window will pop up and you can give it a name for the
filter name so right now I'm under my delete all filter and this is a dangerous one by the way
you're going to see some options in there now the options that I'm looking at right now
right under the name that you would give for your filter you'd see the little message the
label that says was that apply filter when I have manually run selected I also have
getting new mail and right beside that it gives the option for you to select something and the
option I have selected is filter before junk classification so that's I have those two check
which is manually run and getting new mail now beneath that they have archiving after sending
empirically every 10 minutes those are not checked those are the check boxes now down at the
bottom you're going to see a couple of radio buttons down there those are the circular buttons not
the square buttons so you're going to see match all of the following I don't use that one and I'll
tell you why I'm just a bit here the one I use is match any of the following and that's key
there not match all match any of the following and then there's match all messages and I don't
use that one either I use match any of the following and in the bottom when I'm going to add a
thing to filter so you'd see like a little plus button on the right over there I have from as the
first option the first thing that you want to begin matching any of the following so we're going to
do from which is who the who it's coming from the message is coming from then our second option
is it must contain so basically from x person containing x statement or x strength whatever
and now the string is the third field that that I basically just put a domain in there
and the domains that I put into the delete all filter political ads that come in so you know
every year is going to be political ads and tons and tons about like I know with these particular
things I'm never going to come back and and I don't want to view them I don't want to do anything
with them I just want them to go away permanently and I every time I get a political ad that comes in
I edit my delete all filter that I have set up and I just come in and I just dump the domain in there
now what I mean by the domain domain you'll get an email address that say John Doe at politics.com
right I delete the part of the string that has John Doe or John Doe and I keep the part of the
string which is at politics.com now by just putting the at politics.com it doesn't matter
if it's John Doe, Jane Doe, Bill Doe, Greg Doe it doesn't matter who it is from that domain that
sends me a message if it comes from that domain it's going to be automatically deleted that's
what this filter is designed for now at the bottom down there you'll see perform these actions
and that's where I have you know you can select like move message 2 and it'll give you folder
options where you want to move message 2 you can have markets red tag the message set junk status
ignore you know I have delete message now this is a very powerful one and you really want to be
careful because there is no coming back when you do that so if you accidentally copied like you know
an important email address that sends you like invoices or something like that yeah you're
going to be in trouble so be careful using that one I like it just mainly for the politics and
whenever all those political messages and things come in just automatically copy them and put them
right in there and yeah they just automatically get deleted now the reason I have something like that
is because whenever the people who are sending you these phishing emails and things of that nature
normally they are going to try and mimic like a star or something like that but sometimes they
will just mimic whatever they think you'll click on and what you'll notice is if you view your emails
like I view them which is in plain text now I'm going to let me tell you how to get to the plain
text thing real quick first if you click on the message tab so you can hit old and it'll pull up
the message tab oh excuse me excuse me it's not the message tab I believe it's view yeah so you
hit old and you can hit V I don't know what the natal thing is for V so but just click on view
and you V is in view there you go and then you can hit B as in body which is it will select the
message body as menu and then you can go down to plain text there's three options and it is
original text I mean there's original HTML simple HTML and plain text I always use plain text
except for when I'm printing certain things not printing to paper but printing to PDF for archiving
in my own personal way that's when I use original HTML but other than that I normally when I'm
just viewing all emails I do plain text and what you'll notice when you do that is when those
phishing emails come in those scammers or whoever they are the image the original HTML of that
email will look like it comes from let's just say Amazon it'll look exactly like it comes from
Amazon they'll have the appropriate images it'll be designed to look like it's from Amazon
but when you view it as plain text you'll notice that it'll just be links no images and it'll just
be like the text included in the actual thing if there is any text they may embed all the text
onto an image and then you know send you that image so you'll notice that it's just a couple of
links in there and the links aren't in aren't from Amazon they don't go to Amazon or anything so you
know it's just a scam so basically you know plain text is a security measure that allows you to just
basically see and read your email now what I wish they would do I wish there was a feature in here
where you could turn off links where you could not possibly click on the link like it would just
be literally plain text not not a actual hyperlink in there you know so if there's a link that you
wanted to click on maybe you can enable that feature to make links clickable but I would like it where
it just links aren't clickable at all what I do whenever I'm reviewing a certain email that
appears to be somewhat suspicious and I'm not sure if those links are real or not
so I'm reviewing this email right we're just going to create a quick scenario here I'm reviewing
this email I'm not sure if these links are real I'm viewing it in plain text I'm going to go right
over here on the you'll see like a button is there there'll be several buttons first of all
depending on the layout you're using I think I'm using vertical let me check really quickly
let me click on the hamburger menu because that's how I normally get to it and then we go down to
is it customized uh-huh we click on customize and then there will be layout and I am currently using
the classic view layout and I have my folder pane and my message pane so that's the layout I'm
using right now and you'll see when you're opening a message the message will be at the bottom with
the list of emails in your inbox or whatever folder you're looking at will be at the top so I'm
looking at the buttons above the email to have reply forward archive jump delete and more if you
click on the option more then you can save the email as a different format which I just save it
as a plain text file or you can print it to a PDF file and that way you can view it the same way it
looks in the email as a PDF file but the link will not be clickable that's the main reason why I do it
and I exported as a text file mainly so that I can examine that link I can copy that link go to a
certain site that I feel like um but there's certain sites out there like if you get with
Northern Antivirus they have their site checker and I'll copy that link go over to Norton dump it
in there and just let them give me some sort of feedback on that that link so that way if I'm not
sure if that's the real deal or not you know that just ways I try to verify what the hell I'm looking
at looks real enough but just in case I'm wrong let me try and figure out what's going on here
without actually accidentally clicking on the link and sometimes the reason why I wish there was
a setting to turn the links off I don't often check my email when I'm holding my daughter because
she likes to reach a slap on the keyboard and just I mean when she gets tired of being in my arm
she'll start to wiggle and move around and I might accidentally click on something and I become
furious when that happened you know I don't want her to believe that I'm angry at her but I really
don't want to click on a fishing link or anything so it's like you know if if there was a setting
where I could just turn off all links they're no longer clickable at all or if it was like an um
I think in Libre office if you wanted to actually click on the link and open it in a browser
you had to hold down control then click the link I think Libre office is the program thinking
of that does that so you can hold down control then click on the link and it will actually open the
versus the link just opening up when you click on it so I wish there were measures like that in
there maybe I can probably send that in as a feature request or something but um yeah I'll take
I'll take a look at that but those are just some measures that I used to try and reduce the off
chance that I would probably click on something terrible you know I can investigate certain things
by using plain text and then you know exporting that message to a plain text a document
so the links aren't active then I can safely copy and examine those links from a plain text while
I mean from a plain text editor like you know I'm I'm using Z here on or Visual Studio Codium
but I prefer Z because Z doesn't do any sort of links at all Visual Studio Codium will actually
provide a link in there but I mean you don't necessarily click on the link in there but I still
just like Z because it's super simple you're not clicking on the link in Z so that's why I use it
I mean you can use them too I mean either them nano whatever you want to use
yeah you know just view your links you can investigate them further so make sure that everything
safe and only up and up also one of the things I do is I use the Ubuntu font because it has the
least amount of duplicate character models you know the indistinguishable character models where the
one looks exactly like the lowercase L and that also looks exactly like the uppercase I you know
what I mean the the character data is different but the actual character model is just this bar
so they're they're just the copy and paste of the model across all three characters yeah I don't
use fonts like that the Ubuntu font has from what I could find no duplicate characters like that
so that's why I use that font now I do wish that the I like the capital I would have serifs
I'm glad that they put a serif on the lowercase I guess the car serif right the little
things on the letter whatever they're called um the lowercase L does have sort of like a bend at
the top and the bend at the bottom to distinguish it from like say an uppercase I the uppercase I
into Ubuntu font is just a single bar a horizontal I mean a vertical bar so let's continue on I guess
I got a few more things I can share with you now one of the things I'm transitioning to now with my
email strategy is I have a bunch of folders in my email thing right so you know you got your inbox
you drive your sent your archive bulk etc and then you have all the folders that you create so I
have like my finances folder my invoices folder just several other folders in there and what I'm
doing is setting up filters to automatically filter out certain emails into those folders
and ultimately what I want to do is everything that I want to keep say if it's a certain invoice
that the of a large purchase or whatever I'm going to definitely archive that you know
print it out to a PDF file and save the actual email file and that way I can archive those onto
my backup solutions that I have and then if anything were to happen to the message in my email
doesn't matter because I still have it backed up offsite you know I mean not offsite but off
onto other disks and things what I want to do is eventually start filtering out everything from
the inbox so all the mail will come into the inbox is just going to literally be an intake
once the mail comes into the inbox it'll automatically be introduced to all of the different
filters I have that takes certain things moving to the work folder personal folders all that good
stuff then I'll have a chance to just give a quick eyeball over the the inbox you know see everything
that's left in there if there's something that I missed maybe emails like say from my bank right
my bank may send me a your account statement is is ready you know so because I do paperless for as
much things as I can so they'll say hey you know your your account thing is ready you can go online
and view it now that's not necessarily it's literally something I want to backup or even keep
I'm glad to have that message don't get me wrong but it's not something so important that I want
to archive it so it's fine that can sit in there I don't need to actually set up a filter for that
but if it was your for your refund was posted or whatever okay I'll probably back that up
you know a refund or whatever especially if it's an of a certain amount of money I'll make sure
to keep that now everything else that's in there I can just eyeball it in at the end of the month
so right now we're in March at the end of March what I'll do is I'll give it one last eyeball just
glance over real quick and everything that just looks like yeah I mean it has some importance by not
enough to keep move it all over to the bulk and that way my inbox is fresh every single month
and the bulk just builds up all of this crap and and say like at the end of about six months or so
I can go check out the bulk real quick yep yep all that stuff in the bulk looks like stuff I don't
want to keep it was important for the time that I had it but truthfully it's not something I want
to backup and keep so empty bulk you know you can right click on your bulk and you see empty junk
click on empty junk boom all of it goes away just don't dump it all in trash delete and then
hey next couple of months just keep running that technique over and over again and as new things
that I signed up for like recently I went on humble bundle and I thought I bought a bunch of HTML
books turns out those were courses I should have read that bundle and I have a massive humble
bundle library I call it my humble library because that's that's what it is I just have tons and
tons of digital books most of which I'm never going to get to but I feel like if I had the time
I would love to get to them so yeah so yeah I thought I was getting a bunch of HTML books I really
wanted it for the CSS because I was going to learn a little bit more about CSS to finish tricking
out my Linux meant Cinnamon environment the the Cinnamon theme files are written with CSS so I wanted
just kind of brush up on that and make sure I know what I was doing and turns out those were courses
though so I had to sign up for this damn course and so now that's an email I'm going to have to add
to a filter to to move into a certain folder or whatever but yeah as things like that happen in
the future even for certain sites that like say we do couponing as well when certain coupons come
and I have a folder for that and then by the boom by the bang you know stuff I want to keep
goes into the important folders and everything else just sits in the inbox until it's moved over to
bulk and every month I get a fresh inbox so there's less to worry about and more easy wonderful
emailing to deal with now one of the good things about Thunderbird that I also like excuse me
clear my throat here there we go yeah one of the other things I like about Thunderbird as well as
the calendar is really nice in here I've I've saw unread it a lot of people were complaining oh I
want a more modern looking email client you know something more modern for me personally it's all
about being able to get my work done that's the best program in the world where I can sit down
and get my work done without worrying about configuring a million different things spending hours
tweaking and all that I can sit down and get my work done and I get a dark mode best program in the
world here's here's my money you know take my money so yeah I'm really really loving Thunderbird
the calendar is really nice I mean as there there are some small little glitches that occur
with it from time to time but they say that they're rebuilding the calendar so I'm being a little
careful with all the different things that I'm adding to the calendar because I'm a big
proponent of land I want to host as many services on my land as possible and on Linux Mint we have
this thing called warpinator so basically what I do all of our computers run Linux Mint in here right
I'll have warpinator setup and my calendar folder cat file I can export from my main system to
the what do you call it Thunderbird calendar file whatever they call it and then using Linux Mint's
warpinator I can then share that file with my other PCs on the network on the land and then
update the calendars on every PC so my main system I have multiple monitors big they're 24 inch
monitors and I can just sit down and work nice and comfortably here and then export over to the
laptops and even share like an under the calendar tab I'll have multiple calendars and I get
the home calendar for all of the stuff that happens in the house as far as bills and things of that
nature I have the work calendar where I use to manage hours I have the hacker public radio calendar
where I try to manage where I'm going to put out an episode in the research that I'm doing for
that episode where I can store into that calendar you know here's a site that I was checking up
on back and go back and just you know all the small things that I want to do multiple different
I even have a calendar specifically for my daughter in there and the reason why I separate them
like that is because I can export what I want out to share with say my wife or you know whatever
whoever I can just export that out and just say here you go update your calendar with this and now
we can all be on the same page and it's not only internet I don't have to worry about anybody hacking
into that or anything like I got to clean my throat again pardon me yes excuse me I don't
have to worry about anybody hacking into our you know calendar seeing all our personal information
or anything like that and of course I don't store anything like SSN numbers or anything like that
is but still my my calendar is my private thing I also do the handwritten agendas which I love
that's how I once I got into those oh my god it kept me from double booking things and I was
actually able to just mmm so good love them I used to see it big models from Walmart those really
nice but I'm enough of that we're talking about Thunderbird and of course my throat's going out
again all right so yeah once once you get into it and start learning about the calendar setting up
all your multiple calendars and then you can you can activate which calendar you want to see at
what time so when you get into those busy months things kind of get a little clustered all over
the screen with the different calendars you have on there but you can just take off the ones you
don't want to see at the moment and it's really nice the event schedulers really nice as well
because you can add your your your people from your address book to the events and then they'll get
them an email you know letting them know that they've been added and all that kind of stuff's really
cool so yeah I think that's about it for the Thunderbird thing I'm trying to think of there's anything
else I know as soon as I'm on my way to work I'm gonna think oh my god I forgot to tell them about
this but yeah it's it's a wonderful program I add in the SS the RSS feeds into Thunderbird as well
I manage as much messaging as possible in Thunderbird and I guess what I could ramble off on just
for a little while is the Unix philosophy I know that there are a lot of people who use the Unix
philosophy to an extreme like there I guess their belief is Thunderbird shouldn't have all these
different things in it like the say the calendar with the event list and the RSS feed knowledge at
into one program and I also love the address book in Thunderbird is what the address book is
wonderful I took the time to take a bunch of businesses that I communicate with and just
updated their information in the address book like just really filling it out wonderful I wish I
could export that to like a CSV file or whatever and put on my iPhone but iPhone is a pain in the
ass so I'm really really hoping our Linux alternatives are speedily coming along and I'm really
looking forward to getting something like a pine phone someday and just having that as my actual
phone that would be oh it'll be a dream but right now we gotta do we gotta do so back to Thunderbird
I really don't I really don't care about the Unix philosophy that much I've been doing some research
on that and I'm gonna probably do an episode on that as well crap now I'm already I'm already bound
to it now but I was I was doing some research on it and the the thing I was wondering is like okay
well everything's called ganu here and my understanding of ganu is ganu not Unix so if we if we're
making clear that this is ganu not Unix meaning not containing any Unix code or whatever our
understanding of the Unix philosophy main I mean it's a wonderful philosophy when I read through
some of the different points I think it's like 19 points about making you know modular code that
is reusable and everything like that it's seeing the bit I don't know it's it's a nice idea I just
don't know how anybody is actually gonna be but because I'm not a programmer is why I don't know
right if I was a programming maybe maybe this will make much more sense to me but I just don't see
it working in today's environment where programs are very robust you know these programs are wonderful
they're they filled with all sorts of features and everything and they're just great I don't see
anybody wanting to deal with extensions look at ganu has ganu unfair to well using the extension
system you get what I'm saying every person I know they uses ganu pretty much hates the extension
system they want a lot of features to be built in and maintained but then ganu but when you have
to use the extensions what happens is the ganome gets updated but the extensions don't therefore
your workflow suffers until the people who are doing the extensions get caught up and they don't
work for Fedora or Ganoma whoever so they're probably just members of the community that create on
their own time so there's going to be lag in that update which means your workflow suffers until
I just don't see that as a as a thing so the Unix philosophy to me it may just be my flawed
understanding but I think it should be used very sparingly in ganu you know I'm gonna stand firmly
on the ganu not Unix thing and I'm gonna do some more research and try to get a better episode
out about that so enough rambling on all the great wonderful aspects of open source software free
and open source software shot out to a hookah as well oh god I gotta give a hookah thank you very
much man you're wonderful you're awesome I listened to that episode the other day about batch
processing with audacity and I was thinking of myself the other day this gotta be some way they
they're gonna make this a little easier but I just don't have the time to go search and for every
I'm trying to prepare shows I'm doing my work I'm catching up on all my agendas and everything
if they feel turned out all these emails with this wonderful program Thunderbird gotta set up time
to go ahead and do another donation to Thunderbird lots and lots of good stuff as well as download
my humble books that I just bought and finding out that there was uh that one issue where the HTML
things were actually courses and out bookings yeah that one because I'm I definitely don't have time
to actually do the courses but hey whatever yeah a hookah put that that message out there uh that
that show saying hey you can batch process this is how you do it and here's a link to a video
where I eventually learn and I thought I just love this community hands up give yourself a pat
on the back I applaud you all for your efforts it's wonderful and you put up with me in my
rambling so I guess that means there's a there's a in a ward in life somewhere for you just
just get your put up with me so I thank you all and um that concludes our episode done up for my
rambling enjoy your day
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