Thursday August 28, 2008 Getting Thunderbird to Automatically Load Images in Emails
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For the version of Thunderbird I'm running under OpenSolaris 2008.05, when you receive an email with images in it, I get a little "banner" at the top of the email where I have to click the "Load Images" button in order to see the images in that email. |
Well today it got to the point where it had annoyed me enough that I wanted to adjust this, so that images where automatically loaded. Seems simple right?
After spending about five minutes looking at all the Preferences options and Account Settings options and not finding it, I decided to google for it.
The solution is to bring up Edit->Preferences, click on the Advanced panel, go to the General tab and click on the "Config Editor..." button. Then look for the "mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image" setting and double click on the "true" word to turn it to "false".
Why is this so hard? Why couldn't there be some way of doing it directly from the little banner with the "Load Images" button? Maybe a little "Change this..." link.
Anyway, hopefully this post will save somebody else a few minutes if they are struggling with the same problem.
( Aug 28 2008, 01:58:38 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [6]
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Rich, you picked a topic (email with embedded images) that has had my recent attention, albeit not with Thunderbird. Thanks for the tips.
Posted by Carolyn on August 28, 2008 at 03:43 PM PDT #
Did you file an RFE? ;-) ;-)
Posted by joanie on August 28, 2008 at 10:24 PM PDT #
No. I still have outstanding RFE's against Mozilla
from circa 2000-2001. From this experience, I'm
not convinced that it would be worth the effort.
I just made a note on how to fix it, blogged
about it to try to help others, then moved on.
Posted by Rich Burridge on August 29, 2008 at 07:44 AM PDT #
Errr, this is a security feature that you have just turned off!?
A technique used by Spammers and legitimate mail senders alike is to embed an image in the e-mail they send to you. The image will have a unique URL to you. If they see a hit on their webserver for that URL they no only know that you received the mail but also read it. The spammers then throw more stuff at you.
Just add the legitimate senders of this mail to your address book, Thunderbird won't prompt you for e-mail addresses in your address book.
Posted by Dogsbody on May 27, 2009 at 04:25 AM PDT #
how do I get Thunderbird to start automatically when I start Firefox
Posted by wayne on July 31, 2009 at 06:41 PM PDT #
This is a security feature that is only necessary if you let TB automatically select and open messages. You can't turn it off globally, but if you close the message window before filing or deleting messages you can stop TB from automatically viewing the next one.
Since I only open emails from people that I trust, I always want the images to display without hassle. Plus hiding the images sometimes obscures the entire contents of the email so it doesn't help me determine the legitimacy of an unfamiliar email because I have to end up showing the images to find out anyway, thus no security protection there either.
The so-called fix of adding the sender to the address book is problematic for two reasons:
1. it adds the sender to the address book, which often is not someone whose email I want to clutter my address book with (at the very least you should be able to change the default setting so they don't all go to my personal email address by default).
2. In the case that the email is coming from a commercial entity such as an airline, vendor like amazon, etc, the emails they sent often come from different email addresses (such aqs customerservice@ or sales@ or confirmation@, etc). Some vendors appear to have a different email address for every message they send. Therefore adding them to the address book doesn't fix the problem because their next email may come from a different address. I have found that at least half of the commercial senders I get mail from are in this category.
The image protection is a band-aid fix for the security problem created by automatically opening messages. If there were a way to stop TB from doing that it would address the original problem instead of adding a band-aid.
Posted by Andy on October 15, 2009 at 12:28 PM PDT #