Mozilla Thunderbird

From EdWiki

How to deploy Thunderbird on your network.

1 Install Thunderbird on the clients
2 Logon script modifications
- 2.1 Now we need to make everyone use that profiles.ini file
3 User Setup

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Install Thunderbird on the clients

Grab thunderbird from here

Install the program as normal.

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Logon script modifications

We want our users to have their settings and emails stored in the users home directories. A clever user could set this up for themselves but we want to make it easy for them and the same on all our computers.

To do this we edit the profiles.ini file that thunderbird uses to specify where the users profile is stored.

Open up my computer and go to

C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Thunderbird

where user is your username.

Open up profiles.ini with your favourite text editor.

It looks somthing like this

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/jmvwymvx.default

We need to change it so that it is going to store the profile in the users home directory. So we change this file to look somthing like this

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=users
IsRelative=0
Path=h:\thunderbird
Default=1

Now copy this file to a shared location.

In this case the users home directories are mapped to H: so we put the profiles in a folder called thunderbird on the H: drive. This is where it stores the emails as well.

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Now we need to make everyone use that profiles.ini file

We need to add a section to our logon script for eg. logon.bat like the following.

h:
cd\
if not exist thunderbird mkdir thunderbird
c:
cd\
copy \\server\share\profiles.ini "C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\thunderbird\

Now everytime someone logs on they will get that file.

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