I used Thunderbird Portable 3.1.6 on a freshly installed Windows XP+SP3 PC (Dell, German) and now Windows’ logon screen shows "1506 ungelesene E-Mails" ("1506 unread emails") for the user I ran TB Portable under.
So it seems TB Portable somehow stores information on the PC, or leaves registry entries.
Could someone more knowledgeable please have a look into this?
Hint: Windows can be configured not to show the number of unread emails on the logon screen, so be sure to have this function enabled while testing.
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The problem in this case is that it's either Windows grabbing it, or Thunderbird reporting it, and we can't do anything about it really. It was seen as a privacy leak by Microsoft, which is why it's removed in Vista and 7.
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
We had that exact problem a (long) while back and it was fixed. Its a registry key where Windows/Thunderbird stores that number. You can try resetting it by using the tool here.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\UnreadMail
is the registry key for it, but how ever it works, on some systems this key is simply not present and windows interprets it as active and will try to count and display all unread mails found somewhere.
Normally, there will be entries for every account found and number of mails under key MessageCount.
To stop the counter, there has to be a key under UnreadMail with the name MessageExpiryDays. This set by default to 3days. But initially this key is not present under the current user.
One can use the feature given by Simeon, this will simply create the key and set it to 0 at the same time, or use things like tweak ui, which has a tickbox for it under logon, or if possible create the key by hand in the registry.
BTW: under w7 (have no vista) the key MessageExpiryDays is not present at all apparently, the MessageCount is still here and can be set to 0 and is not functioning from there apparently, but this is kind of confusing.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland