My Geek Notes

I was browsing around the other day and found that Thunderbird 2 had been released. I’ve been casually checking the mozilla site ever since I noticed that Thunderbird 2 was in beta. My current version of Thunderbird had not yet detected the upgrade but I thought what the heck I’ll give it a try.

Some of the new features like improved searching, custom message tagging, and advanced folder views, are really nice. Since on occasion TB on WinXP crashes, I was also hopping for an overall stability improvement, as well.

After I installed the new version, which was painless by the way, I noticed a rather annoying issue. All new messages in my Inbox were already marked read even though I had not opened the Inbox and had not read any messages. I started to look a little closer and the messages appeared to come in as un-read but then change almost immediately. After searching Google and the Thunderbird forums I found a few posts where others had the same issue. The forum posts had attributed it to the filtering rules.

After messing with the rules, turning them off etc. I still had the issue. Then I noticed that every time the message alert pops up the messages that appeared in the alert were getting marked read. One of the new features in the 2 version is that when a new message is received an alert pops up and tells you about the new message then disappears. The new pop alerts contain more message information, including a message preview, than they did the past versions. Yep you guessed it the message preview was marking the message as read when the alert was fired off.

The fix turned out to be pretty simple, don’t show message preview text in the alerts. To disable this setting open Thunderbird, Click on the Tools menu in the menu bar then click on Options under Tools. In the Options window, select the General Tab and click the Customize button next to the Show an alert checkbox. In the Customize New Mail Alert window, un-check the Message Preview Text checkbox and click the OK button. Click the OK button to close the Options window. That’s it, now you’ll still get the message alerts minus the preview and the message will not be marked read until you read it or mark it read yourself.