Command line arguments - Thunderbird: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 16:48, 3 August 2006

Thunderbird supports the following command line arguments:

  • All of the Mozilla command line arguments that aren't browser specific. Notice the syntax section at the bottom of that writeup. You can use -compose message_options to have it bring up the compose message window and fill in everything for you, but you still need to press the Send button to actually send the message.
  • The -profile "path" command line argument to specify the location of the profile. It's used to run Thunderbird with the specified profile regardless of whether the Profile Manager knows about that profile's existence. It's described in more detail in the writeup on USB drive support but it does not require a USB drive. Its useful if you're a roaming user or Thunderbird somehow lost track of your profile (perhaps due to your system crashing) and you want to verify the profile is still good before trying to fix the problem. Example: "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe" -profile e:\my_profile will launch Thunderbird with the profile stored at e:\my_profile. A quick sanity check is that e:\my_profile should contain your prefs.js file. Note however that you normally cannot start Thunderbird with a second profile if Thunderbird is already running.

Issues

The -compose command line argument doesn't work correctly in Thunderbird 1.5 due to a parsing bug. It generates the compose message window but none of the fields are filled in. The only workaround is to use a mailto: URL. However, this prevents you from passing an attachment due to a security restriction.

thunderbird -compose "mailto:somebody@somewhere?cc=address@provider&subject=hi&body=something"

See also