In-Cider Knowledge: ADMXPI For Thunderbird

Lockable Thunderbird!

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 23:23:14 GMT

Up until now, I have always thought that Thunderbird has not had the same lockable functionality as Firefox.

Earlier this week, a colleague in the Desktop Services Team at the University of Edinburgh (the same team as me), Kenny MacDonald, who is looking at delivering Managed OS X and Linux installs, chanced upon this functionality.

This is demonstrated here, on our Team Wiki: https://adelie.ucs.ed.ac.uk/dstwiki/index.php/Thunderbird

I am going to have a look at this as much as I can to incorporate group policy functionality into this and hopefully will be able to add something to this, a cross between FirefoxADM and Firefox Group Policy extension if you will. However, all the code, as is, is there if you wish to adapt it to your environment.

Anyway, its a great find.

New Release for ADMXPI for Thunderbird

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 21:52:57 GMT

I have posted a new release of the Thunderbird extension which allows Active Directory control to my website. Download at:

http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/mcs/tbird_admxpi.zip

Couple of major enhancements to this one. Most notably, it now allows you to use environment variables in values. That was a hefty update because it meant using Regular Expressions to replace the variable. You can only use one-per-preference but that is usually enough. There is a special case when you might use %HOMESHARE%%HOMEPATH%. In this extension, use %HOMESHAREHOMEPATH% instead, its a "special" environment variable, and drop me an email at mark.sammons at ed.ac.uk if you are having success or problems with it.

I'll update the Firefox ADMXPI with similar functionality in the next week or so.

A bit more meat...

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 00:57:52 GMT

So, what do we have here?

ADM XPI for Thunderbird is the equivilant to ADM XPI for Firefox: both work only on version 1.5 (and above, I guess), both allow you to set properties by registry value, and therefore, by Group Policy.

At the moment, Thunderbird's settings are stored per-preference at either HKEY_CURRENTUSER\Software\Policies\Thunderbird or HKEY_LOCALMACHINE\Software\Policies\Thunderbird. If you set the same preference with different values in HKLM and HKCU, HKLM wins. Unlike Firefox, there appears to be no locking preferences mechanism.

So, in the (sorry, blurry) screenshots posted previously, I set the preference "mail.server.server2.name" to be HELLO!, and this then became the name of the account I set up in Thunderbird. All through having this extension installed in Thunderbird.

Try it with other settings! Just make sure that they are (a) String Values in the registry even if setting a boolean or numeric value (eg. strings of "true" or "false" will be correctly interpreted by Thunderbird as true or false in boolean preferences) and (b) at the moment, this doesn't support wildcards such as environment variables...sorry.

Here's a little something...

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 12:56:41 GMT

Some people might be interested in this!

Notice the HELLO! ?

ADMXPI for Thunderbird... http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/mcs/admxpi_tbird.zip

More later on this.