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U3 T-bird profiles

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July 29, 2006 - 12:14pm
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djenner
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U3 T-bird profiles

On portable (as opposed to in-my-study) machines, I have Thunderbird set up with different profiles; one accesses mail through the in-house mailserver (lots of filtering and additional security); the other picks up and sends the mail using direct connections to the relevant servers. Accessing the profile manager is, in the usual way of things, a matter of inputing a command line parameter "-profilemanager" using start -> run.

There seems to be no way to do this in the U3 version of Thunderbird. It does not seem to me likely that simply copying profiles from, e. g., the Thunderbird installation on one of my notebooks would be trivial.

What am I missing? Or, is this a case where I would do better to just forget about U3 and revert ot a portable but not U3 version of the software?

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July 29, 2006 - 12:33pm
John T. Haller
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Which TB U3, Profile Manager

Unless you downloaded today, you probably have the YourBrainz version, which is supported here:
http://home.yourbrainz.com/

Neither TB for U3 nor TB Portable support the Profile Manager. The Profile Manager in Mozilla's products only works with locally installed profiles. There may be multiple profile support built into a future release of TB Portable. It's being investigated. Several people use multiple profiles with TB Portable by having seperate launcher instances and using INI files. Check out the Other\PortableThunderbirdSource directory for a readme.txt that explains it. These advanced options are only available for the non-U3 version.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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July 29, 2006 - 1:34pm
(Reply to #2)
djenner
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Your U3 Thunderbird

Nope, not YourBrainz. You got the nod in the Mozilla press release, and a look at your site indicates you're an enthusiast -- never a bad thing. Your log should show a download in the late hours of Friday night, or perhaps the wee hours of Saturday morning.

I'd have thought that, as you store a profile in the relevant data directory (in the U3 system folder), that multiple profiles per se would not be an issue, but that accessing the manager (a rather nasty holdover from a long time ago?...) might be a real problem, perhaps requiring some kind of utility, or (if one were lucky) an extension.

In any case, I think you should consider giving this some degree of precedence; I imagine there are more than a few of us who hope to be able to access mail in different access-method situations? I imagine some of that may even apply to Firefox as well -- situations where here one has a proxy server to accommodate, there one is connecting directly?

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July 29, 2006 - 4:42pm
(Reply to #3)
Bruce Pascoe
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...

For multiple proxy settings, there's the SwitchProxy extension. For multiple access situations in TB, you can create different accounts with the same email address but different connection settings. You don't need multiple user profiles to do these things.

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Lauren She eats everything! It's like having a goat. A giant, two-Godzillaton goat.
maggie Hey, I resent that remark! I only weigh ONE Godzillaton!
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July 29, 2006 - 7:21pm
(Reply to #4)
djenner
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multiple access

That's a good thought, and I will probably do something like that. Or I might just assume that one would not really need the in-house-mailserver access when using the flash key and do the out-of-house installation only.

I think the profile manager is a good solution, and have never understood why it is so deeply hidden.

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July 29, 2006 - 10:30pm
(Reply to #5)
John T. Haller
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Profile Manager is out

As mentioned, the profile manager simply does not work portably. It's tied to local profiles within the Application Data directory on your local hard drive, so it's just not an option.

I may at some point build multiple profile support into Thunderbird Portable. But not the U3 version. It's very far down the list though for TBP. There's simply not much call for multiple profiles in either the desktop or portable versions of these apps. On the desktop, it uses the OS to have one profile per user. On the portable side, it's usually a one user per key thing. That's why it's buried. Most people simply don't need it... and for the ones that don't... having it on by default was very confusing... that's why they dropped it.

Plus, in the 2 years I've been working on Portable FF/TB... multiple profile support has only been asked for by about 5 people.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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July 29, 2006 - 11:32pm
(Reply to #6)
John T. Haller
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Press Release? And Proxies

What press release? Seems I'm often out of the loop on these things...

If you encounter multiple proxies... there's SwitchProxy which can store them all for you and make it easy to switch. It's detailed right on the support page. If your SMTP server changes, the smtp switcher Bruce mentioned is a good bet. But also try the alternate ports. You should always be SMTPing securely with either TLS or SSL. Those ports are often not blocked by providers that specifically block the standard SMTP port, port 25 (the reason being that port 25 can be used to send spam to any mail server in the world. the others can not). Of course, if you're in an office that blocks everything, you'd still be out of luck. Either way, not much call for multiple profiles.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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July 30, 2006 - 1:44am
(Reply to #7)
Ryan McCue
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No Press Release

on Mozilla.com or Mozilla.org contains anything about John, Portable Apps.com or Portable Firefox.
Not that I found anyway.
----
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PortaBlog is now officially out of beta!

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."

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July 30, 2006 - 8:36pm
(Reply to #8)
djenner
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Mozilla -> U3 press release

http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2005-01-07.html

In the release on this page:

"More information on versions of Firefox and Thunderbird available for USB flash drives can be found at http://portablefirefox.mozdev.org/ and http://portablethunderbird.mozdev.org/."

At portablefirefox&c.: "Portable Firefox is currently hosted on my website. I am recompiling the web pages into a more MozDev-friendly format and will be moving in soon! -- John T. Haller, Project Owner." This sentence includes a link to portableapps.com.

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July 30, 2006 - 8:52pm
(Reply to #9)
Bruce Pascoe
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...

Actually, the link is to johnhaller.com, John's old website. The MozDev page mentioned appears to predate PortableApps.com.

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Lauren She eats everything! It's like having a goat. A giant, two-Godzillaton goat.
maggie Hey, I resent that remark! I only weigh ONE Godzillaton!
~ Spectacles: Bruce's Story

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July 30, 2006 - 8:58pm
(Reply to #10)
djenner
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Oops!

Yup. The johnhaller.com site page has a link to portableapps.com. Mea culpa. The original point still stands. Haller/PortableApps is the original/accept-no-substitute. And he clearly likes what he's doing. Excellent secondary causes.

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July 30, 2006 - 8:53pm
(Reply to #11)
djenner
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release / profiles

I put the link to the Mozilla U3 release, which in turn points to your portablefirefox page there, which in turn points here, in a reply to rmccue.

Anent the profile manager: I have carried one or another portable computing solution since the mid-'80s (I think Mrs. Jenner still has the NEC thingummy with the six-line LCD squirreled away somewhere). Currently, a couple Portégés do the job (I am hoping to reduce reliance on them for everything but longer trips). Say perhaps, I have given some thought to portability, especially as it meets my special needs. It's not just proxy settings and SMTP settings that change, but some changes in accounts that have to be polled -- directly, rather than being managed by the mail server -- and the profile manager seems the most elegant way to do things.

If it were just a question of multiple users, the matter would not arise; that is a function better handled by the OS. But different "personæ" for different environments?... Whatever; I can make this work for my out-of-house needs and that will do well enough, I suppose.

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