If you aren’t into geekery, then perhaps you might want to skip this post.
For a while now, maybe a week, I have had difficulties with Thunderbird, Mozilla’s email program. Up until the time I finally got my emails off the main computer and onto my netbook, I was doing OK. I had difficulty in transferring those emails, and did some tinkering with a Thunderbird file called profile.ini. Those of you who are as ancient as I will remember when DOS programs (remember DOS?) always came with an .ini file, which controlled various initial states of the program in question. config.ini was perhaps the most famous of these files.
So Thunderbird still uses a profile.ini file to control where it finds its, um, profile. The profile is not stored in the Program Files folder, it’s stored in an area under Users, which would allow for several people to use Thunderbird on the same machine without falling all over each other.
In the course of my tinkering I found that there is a line in that file that looks like this:
Profile={profile address}
Now the people at Mozilla were crafty. They thought that people might want to place their profiles somewhere other than in Users. So, they had the possibility of two ways of entering the profile address. One was absolute, and one was relative. So, if my profile were in C:\Profiles\chris.profile, I would enter the line:
Profile=C:\Profiles\chris.profile
after telling Thunderbird that I wanted an absolute path to the profile.
However, if I wished to say that the profile was in the Thunderbird profile directory, and not use an absolute path, I would use a relative one:
Profile=.\Profiles\chris.profile
after telling Thunderbird that I wanted a relative path.
All of a sudden, last week I found that it was difficult to move emails into folders in groups. If I selected ten emails to move into a folder and then tried to move them with the mouse, nothing happened. Nada. Rien. Nihil.
If I downloaded emails from the server, I could not open them unless I exited Thunderbird and restarted it. I could not compact folders, and the Inbox folder (which needs to be compacted regularly) showed that it was holding something like “367% of 35.6MB”.
Not good.
I stewed about this for about a week, but today I got a brainstorm. Instead of typing the relative path as I did above, I typed it:
Profile=Profiles\chris.profile
You will note that I removed the “.\” after the “Profile=” keyword. You will be delighted to know that this now works. It seems that while Mozilla believes that DOS-style .ini files are a good idea, it does not go so far as to parse DOS-style pathnames. Worse, instead of refusing to run and saying that it can’t find the profile, it goes ahead and finds it but then doesn’t allow certain operations to happen in it while allowing other things to happily continue to happen.
Is this a bug? Is this a feature? The jury’s still out on that. I do know that this behaviour is not very intuitive and needs to be documented somewhere so that other people who are trying to bring their profiles over from another machine can do so without stumbling over this anachronism.