Modify Thunderbird settings

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Thunderbird stores any settings you created using tools -> account settings in the prefs.js file in your profile. You can edit them using a text editor. You can also create a optional user.js text file in the same directory. Any settings you add to it will be merged into prefs.js by Thunderbird. Adding preferences via user.js helps to minimize the damage if you don't know what you're doing, and requires less knowledge.

  • The ChromEdit extension is a convenient way to add/modify preferences since it doesn't require you to know where your profile is stored. It will display the contents of pref.js and let you edit user.js. If user.js doesn't exist it will create it for you.
  • The About:Config extension adds a tools -> about:config menu command. You can search for any preference using the filter edit field, and then double click on it to modify it. Thunderbird v1.4 (and later versions) includes this extension.
  • There is also a Preferential extension you could use to modify Thunderbird's preferences but it appears to be browser-centric, and not as uptodate as About:Config.

Example:

If you have problems downloading a large message from a POP server or the the webmail extension doesn't fetch all of your new mail you may need to increase the value of the mail.pop3_response_timeout setting to keep Thunderbird from timing out. That setting defaults to 45 seconds. Thunderbird doesn't store a copy of default settings in prefs.js so you can't just edit it. You can increase it to 180 seconds by adding: user_pref("mail.pop3_response_timeout", 180); to either prefs.js or user.js. You could also search for pop3 in the filter using tools -> about:config, find the entry for mail.pop3_response_timeout, double click on the value, and change it to 180.

The defaults\pref\mailnews.js file in your thunderbird program directory contains most of the default settings. It uses a pref prefix rather than a user_pref prefix on any settings. For example, pref("mail.pop3_response_timeout", 45); . You should not edit that file. However, its sometimes usefull to view that file to find out what preferences exist and what are thier default values.