Tipps

Zeige den E-Mail User Agent an

• Öffne den "Konfigurationseditor" über das Menü: Editieren->Einstellungen->Erweitert (klicke "I'll be careful...")

• Suche nach dem Begriff: mailnews.headers.showUserAgent und doppelklicke darauf, um ihn zu aktivieren
• Starte Icedove neu. Wenn du nun eine E-Mail anschaust, wird Dir auffallen, dass unter dem "An:" Feld der "User agent" sichtbar ist.

Externer Editor zum Emails schreiben

• Wenn Du einen externen Editor zum Erstellen von E-Mails benutzen möchtest, schaue unter diesem Artikel nach:globs.org

Konfiguriere PGP Verschlüsselung

Installiere das Enigmail-Plugin und starte den Enigmail Assistenten

1. installiere Enigmail mit

apt-get install enigmail 

1. Starte Icedove neu, falls nötig
2. Wähle im Menü Enigmail → Enigmail-Assistent aus
3. Selektiere Ja und klicke auf Weiter
4. Wähle, ob Du OpenPGP für alle oder nur für ausgewählte Identitäten installieren möchtest (falls Du mehr als eine Identität mit Icedove nutzt). Wenn Du mehrere Identitäten hast und OpenPGP für alle Identitäten installieren auswählst, wird ein Schlüssel für alle Identitäten erstellt.
5. Wähle, ob Du alle ausgehenden E-Mails signieren möchtest. Signieren verschlüsselt keine E-Mails - es platziert Deine digitale Signatur in allen ausgehenden E-Mails, damit andere überprüfen können, ob die E-Mail von Dir gesendet wurde. Es wird empfohlen, nicht alle ausgehenden E-Mails zu signieren, da alles, was du über unverschlüsselte E-Mails sendest, direkt an Dich zurückverfolgt werden kann. Es ist am besten, verschlüsselte E-Mails nur an Leute zu senden, von denen du weißt, dass sie die Verschlüsselung unterstützten.
6. Wähle, ob Du alle ausgehenden E-Mails standardmäßig verschlüsseln möchtest. Dies ist nicht empfehlenswert, da es umständlich wird, wenn Dein Empfänger keine Verschlüsselung unterstützt. Du kannst Verschlüsselungsregeln später einstellen, die es Dir ermöglichen unter bestimmten Bedingungen immer verschlüsselte E-Mails zu versenden.
7. Wähle, ob Du einige von OpenPGP empfohlene Änderungen machen möchtest. Dies sind vor allem technische Konfigurationsänderungen in Icedove, um den OpenPGP-Prozess zu rationalisieren und um Konfigurationen zu vermeiden, die Fehler verursachen könnten. Die meisten Änderungen gefahrlos, verändern in manchen Fällen jedoch die Funktionsweise, vor allem durch die Deaktivierung des Erstellens von HTML-Nachrichten.
8. Erstelle nun entweder einen Schlüssel (falls du nicht bereits einen hast), oder wähle einen bestehenden Schlüssel aus um zu benutzen. Falls du mehrere Schlüssel und/oder mehrere Identitäten hast, kann es sein dass du später einige manuelle Änderungen vornehmen musst um die jeweiligen Schlüssel an die korrekte Identität zu koppeln.
9. Überprüfe die vorgeschlagenen Änderungen und klicke auf Weiter. Sollten keine Fehler zu sehen sein, ist OpenPGP bereit um genutzt zu werden. Klicke auf Fertig.

OpenPGP Regeln

Setup OpenPGP Rules

In Icedove, the Enigmail extension provides the ability for you to setup rules which Icedove will use to automate who will or will not receive encrypted emails from you.

The rule system is pretty powerful and can create a wide array of possible options. This guide will create a rule to always send encrypted email to a specific email address (or multiple email addresses) and operates under the assumption that your emails are unencrypted by default. However, the rule system appears to be powerful enough that if the majority of your contacts use OpenPGP encryption, you can encrypt by default and create a rule that sends unencrypted emails to contacts you have that don’t support encryption.

1. Navigate to OpenPGP → Edit Per-Recipient Rules
2. Click the Add button on the upper right.
3. Enter the email address(es) at the top, separated by spaces if matching multiple email addresses, and is exactly if matching exact addresses or enter matching terms and choose the appropriate matching method. The available matching methods are: is exactly, Contains, Starts with, and Ends with
4. Choose the Action to be applied upon matching the rule. For this example, choose Use the following OpenPGP keys: and press the Select Key(s)… button. In the box that pops up from that button, select the OpenPGP key for the person to whom you’re sending email. If you don’t have their public key, press the Download missing keys button, which will search the key servers for the email(s) you entered in the matching box.
5. Change Encryption in the Defaults for … section to Always and leave Signing and PGP/MIME as Yes, if selected in Message Composition.
6. Press the OK button when you’ve completed the configuration of the rule.

You are now ready to send OpenPGP (GPG) emails to any recipient via Icedove and to automatically enable encryption for the chosen recipient in the rule you just created.

Icedove seems impossible to send mails via STARTLS after installation of libnss 3.14-1

• This problem is not really a Icedove bug (#692886 #692491). With releasing version 3.14-1 of libnss no certificates with a md5 signatures are allowed. It's recommended to check your signatures if you are using md5 based signatures in case of problems. You can do this this

  openssl s_client -connect hostname:587 -starttls < /dev/null | sed -n '/BEGIN/,/END/p' | openssl x509 -text

  Search for "Signature Algorithm". For further information please take a look at https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:MD5and1024

Shortcuts

Take a look at https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts

Create Own Mail Headers

With editing (or creating) your own ~/.icedove/user.js file you are able to create own, not already shipped Mail Header entrys. It have to looks like that. The entry '{custom headers}' is a comma-separated list of the custom headers you want to be available. "Sender,X-Y" adds the Sender: and X-Y: headers, for example.

// This is a comment
user_pref("mail.compose.other.header", "{custom headers}");

In detail take a look at the following example. More infos on this on mozillaZine

// my own Icedove settings in $HOME/.icedove/user.js
// add these headers to the list of possible headers
user_pref("mail.compose.other.header", "X-Debbugs-CC,X-Debbugs-No-Ack");

Selecting URL in Icedove Causes New Page Open In Iceweasel To Take Focus

This problem is reported in #496632. When selecting URL in icedove, window focus is stolen by iceweasel when it loads the url. A temporary workaround is to set the browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground setting. This substantially changes the behavior of iceweasel, so this may not be acceptable for everyone. To access this setting, enter 'about:config' in the url bar. This brings up a warning page, with a button labeled "I'll be careful, I promise!". Scroll to the entry titled "browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground". Double clicking on this line toggles the setting. Setting this to "true" will prevent iceweasel from stealing focus in the described case. The instructions for changing this setting were originally found at http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-stop-firefox-stealing-window-focus.htm

Problems with Indexing of mails/news

In rare cases it may happen that Icedove is permanently keeps indexing of your mails and messages. The reason for this behavior is mostly a broken or damaged SQLite database. This issue will be easy to fix, you have to delete the broken database. Icedove is creating a new database if not present.

1. Close the Icedove application

2. Remove the file $HOME/.icedove/[Your_Profile]/global-messages-db.sqlite

3. Restart Icedove

Icedove and the Mozilla Lightning Extension

The Lightning extension from Mozilla isn't usable with Icedove >= version 24! This happen because of different internally lifetime linking inside the extension. So please use the iceowl-extension from the Debian repositories.

Open Address Book only

Create a launcher with the following command

 icedove -addressbook 

Iceowl-extension does not remember credentials

Mozilla has changed the way to trust certificates after Firefox or Thunderbird 31. Especially self-signed certificates are not trusted by default any longer (#751086). You can change this behavior by modifying the prefs.js directly or using the UI "Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Tab:General -> Config Editor" and change the following key to 'false'.

 security.use_mozillapkix_verification = false 

The future of Icedove

What is the future of the upstream Thunderbird project and consequently the Icedove package(s) in Debian?

Mozilla has changed their approach to developing and managing Thunderbird. A very public anouncement was made about this on 8 July 2012. Since this announcement Mozilla decided to change the focus of their own contributions to the project and will put more emphasis on their web projects and of course on FirefoxOS. Mozilla plans to open the Thunderbird development to a more community driven project but will also be there for security and stability maintenance. There are no plans to close the packaging of Icedove from the Debian side. There is a project webpage from the developer Bejamin Smedbergs which shows the activity from the Mozilla project members. See also the Mozilla TB ESR Release Plan and on the Rapid Release Calendar. As long as Mozilla will provide ESR versions there will be packaged versions of those inside the various release of Debian. The current stable release Debian Wheezy is getting Icedove 17 versions as security updates from the Thunderbird 17 ESR releases. This happen because the Thunderbird 10 ESR circle is marked as end of life and no more security updated will be provided by Mozilla. After the Thunderbird 17 ESR cycle version 24 will be the next ESR release by Mozilla. If possible version 24 will replace version 17 in stable.

It is important to look at this situation in perspective:

• Even though Thunderbird receives less attention from Mozilla than before July 2012, the long term support is still significantly stronger than the support for many other open source projects. There are several examples of popular open source projects that have been completely abandoned by upstream but lived on nonetheless, procmail is one such example.

• The Mozilla announcement doesn't mean that any features will go away, it just means new ones may not be added so quickly. Users and potential users should make any decision about their use of Thunderbird/Icedove based on merit alone, e.g. comparing the features available now against the features in similar packages.

Reporting Bugs

Sometimes Icedove doesn't doing things as expected or some error happen. Then you need help or want to report the issue. Before you do this please visit the web pages Bugs in icedove, calendar-google-provider, calendar-timezones, icedove-dbg, icedove-dev, iceowl-extension and/or icedove-l10n-* and check if you find a solution for your problem or some other bug is closed to yours reported. Please do this careful! Because errors reported twice or more take a lot of time to coordinate!

Your problem isn't there or you want to provide extra information to an already opened bug? You can report it best with reportbug, really! But you can also use a EMail client to send bug reports. To do this please visit Bugs and Reporting.

Before you send your report, please check if you can append some useful information for the developer! Please read the following chapter for this. If you use a version from testing or unstable/experimental please check also if a similar problem is reported to the Bugzilla on Mozilla and provide the URL to that bug entry if possible. This helps the developer (and the reporter too) to get automatic notifications if the status of the upstream bug has changed. If you are an advanced user and you can't find the bug in the database on Mozilla you can create there your new bug report and then open a bug report on the Debian with the upstream URL to this bug. This helps the package maintainers too.

And if you are an expert and can help to scaling down the bug list any help is appreciated! If you can provide some patches to improve Icedove or some other package please don't hesitate to write a mail to the packages maintainer!

Debugging

Sometimes you need some debug information for tracking down problems, for example to give the maintainer more useful information if you have some trouble with Icedove. To get a digestible output with gdb while debugging the application (Icedove and used libraries) must have so named "debugging symbols". For the normal use this symbols inside the application are not necessary. To track file actions there is the possibility to use strace to monitor this.

Preparation

There some dependencies to get a proper debug output. May be you need to install some additional packages. Once the applications with the debugging symbols and the tools to get the output while debugging. Both are necessary. You will need to install the following packages.

Starting Debugging

If these packages are installed you have to start Icedove from a terminal. This is quite simple, you have to give an argument -g to the starting wrapper script of Icedove if the version is <= v10.0.x (like Wheezy or Squeeze). If you use a version of Icedove if > 10.0.x (like stable-security, testing or above) the debugging call has changed. This should be true for all Wheezy installations with security update support (this the default setting while installation). The debugging must be called by the wrapper script /usr/lib/icedove/run-mozilla.sh with option g or debug and the Icedove binary /usr/lib/icedove/icedove-bin. If Icedove is crashing down please also append -safe-mode to prevent the usage of any extension or themes inside Icedove.

   1 # use this if you are running a plain Wheezy without security support (stable) or Squeeze (oldstable)
   2 user@pc:~ $ icedove -g [-safe-mode] 2>&1 | tee /tmp/icedove-gdb-$(apt-cache show icedove | grep Version | awk '{ print $2 }')_$(date +%F_%T).log 

   1 # use this if you are running stable-security, backports, testing or greater
   2 user@pc:~ $ /usr/lib/icedove/run-mozilla.sh -g /usr/lib/icedove/icedove-bin 2>&1 | tee /tmp/icedove-gdb-$(apt-cache show icedove | grep Version | awk '{ print $2 }')_$(date +%F_%T).log 

This starts the gdb with Icedove as program to debug and logs all the output to /tmp/icedove-gdb-[version]_[timestamp].log. The file can be send to a bug report as attachment (consider about packing this file it before!). This is mostly needed if your Icedove is crashing at some action. Please check the output of the gdb! If you see something like no debugging symbols found check the packages you have installed. With no debugging symbols it's worthless to go further! The next step is to start the Icedove inside the gdb with the "run" command.

   1 (gdb) run

The start of Icedove is taking a little time, after a few seconds you will see (hopefully) the normal GUI screen of Icedove. In the terminal there must be some information to see, in normal case the starting and terminating of Threads, this should looks like this.

   1 user@pc:~ $ # !!! use one of the above described command lines !!!
   2 /usr/lib/icedove/run-mozilla.sh -g /usr/lib/icedove/icedove-bin
   3 MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/icedove
   4   LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/icedove:/usr/lib/icedove/plugins:/usr/lib/icedove
   5 DISPLAY=:0
   6 DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/icedove:/usr/lib/icedove
   7      LIBRARY_PATH=
   8        SHLIB_PATH=/usr/lib/icedove:/usr/lib/icedove
   9           LIBPATH=/usr/lib/icedove:/usr/lib/icedove
  10        ADDON_PATH=
  11       MOZ_PROGRAM=/usr/lib/icedove/icedove-bin
  12       MOZ_TOOLKIT=
  13         moz_debug=1
  14      moz_debugger=
  15 moz_debugger_args=
  16 /usr/bin/gdb  --args /usr/lib/icedove/icedove-bin
  17 GNU gdb (GDB) 7.4.1-debian
  18 Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  19 License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
  20 This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
  21 There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
  22 and "show warranty" for details.
  23 This GDB was configured as "x86_64-linux-gnu".
  24 For bug reporting instructions, please see:
  25 <http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>...
  26 Reading symbols from /usr/lib/icedove/icedove-bin...Reading symbols from /usr/lib/debug/usr/lib/icedove/icedove-bin...done.
  27 done.
  28 (gdb) run
  29 Starting program: /usr/lib/icedove/icedove-bin 
  30 [Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
  31 Using host libthread_db library "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libthread_db.so.1".
  32 [New Thread 0x7fffe5993700 (LWP 9761)]
  33 [New Thread 0x7fffe4ad0700 (LWP 9762)]
  34 [New Thread 0x7fffe42cf700 (LWP 9763)]
  35 [New Thread 0x7fffe36ff700 (LWP 9764)]
  36 [New Thread 0x7fffe23ff700 (LWP 9765)]
  37 [New Thread 0x7fffe1bfe700 (LWP 9766)]
  38 [New Thread 0x7fffe03f6700 (LWP 9767)]
  39 [New Thread 0x7fffdf7ff700 (LWP 9768)]
  40 [New Thread 0x7fffdeffe700 (LWP 9769)]
  41 [New Thread 0x7fffddfff700 (LWP 9770)]
  42 [New Thread 0x7fffdc0ff700 (LWP 9771)]
  43 [Thread 0x7fffe03f6700 (LWP 9767) exited]
  44 [Thread 0x7fffdeffe700 (LWP 9769) exited]

If a crash occurs and Icedove stops working and quits, it's possible to get a backtrace of this. For this run the command bt in the terminal there the gdb runs. Remind that Icedove is programmed as a multi threaded program, because of this we want to see all these threads. For more information about gbd around this take a look on How to get a backtrace.

   1 (gdb) thread apply all bt

This gives out a collection of the last status from the stack. This information is needed if you reporting errors with a crashing Icedove.

Debugging of file system activity

It is also possible to see what Icedove is trying do on the file system. For this you can use the tool strace. For this Icedove must also started from a terminal. strace logs every system call Icedove makes, and this is a lot! So it is useful to log directly to a file. Note that the file will growing very fast! Best practice is to write the file to the /tmp folder. The file will be dropped if you turn off your PC.

   1 user@pc:~ $ strace -e file -f -s2048 -o /tmp/icedove_dbg.txt icedove

Debugging Icedove Activity

The activity of Icedove itself can be also logged. For this you have to tell Icedove what component(s) with which level (1 to 5, but just use always 5!) into which file you are want to log. This can be done from the CLI (Command Line Interface -> the console) or via extra start script nor extra setting. Possible components are the MCD (MissionControlDesktop), SMTP or IMAP. If you want to log just all components you can use the word 'all' for all the components.

For example to log the Imap activity with level 5 to ~/icedove-activity.log from the console do this

   1 user@pc:~ $ NSPR_LOG_MODULES=IMAP:5 NSPR_LOG_FILE=~/icedove-activity.log icedove
   2 user@pc:~ $ # or IMAP and SMTP together
   3 user@pc:~ $NSPR_LOG_MODULES=IMAP:5,SMTP:5 NSPR_LOG_FILE=~/icedove-activity.log icedove

You can also put you requirements to a extra file and export/unexport the variables. You may want to do this

   1 # icedove-dbg.sh
   2 # just execute this script to setup this variables
   3 # options for NSPR_LOG_MODULES are
   4 # MCD, SMTP, IMAP or just 'all'
   5 
   6 export NSPR_LOG_MODULES=IMAP:5,SMTP:5
   7 # if you want all components use this
   8 #export NSPR_LOG_MODULES=all:5
   9 export NSPR_LOG_FILE=~/icedove-dbg.txt

Backports for Squeeze

Right now the latest version in backports.debian.org for Icedove is 10.0.12-1 for Squeeze (old-bpo). If you wanna use this you have to add the Debian backport repository to your sources and just run an upgrade or reinstall of Icedove. Locales for this version are also available.

Newer versions then 10.0.x probably will never be available for Squeeze because of dependencies that can't be solved for squeeze.

Backports for Wheezy

For Wheezy currently there are no Debian backports available. The current version in stable-security is 31.2.0 so there are no needs for backports. If you use the Lightning extension from Mozilla please uninstall this first, the Lightning extension don't work with Icedove >= 24. Then install iceowl-extension to use the calendar functionality.

Mike Hommey provides unofficial backports for Icedove. You can install these versions to the current Debian stable release. Please visit mozilla.debian.net for further instructions and information. For locales support you have install the related language manually from the wheezy pool.

But please remember! The packages from mozilla.debian.net not packaged by the Icedove maintainers! If you found issues please remember to write about the repo you use in your bugreport.

Known Problems

There are some problems that needs a lot of time to work on or some rethinking.

• migration, transition of $HOME/.mozilla-thunderbird to $HOME/.icedove or $HOME/.mozilla/thunderbird and /etc/thunderbird to /etc/icedove
• restructuring dependencies for locales of icedove (l10n)

• wrong description in /etc/icedove/pref/icedove.js (#486617)

• out of date backports (#668578)

More useful informations

There are more resources to find informations for working with Icedove.

• Icedove/WhatsNew Information about the changes within the Icedove/Thunderbird versions

• Icedove/Devel Development related things for Icedove

Talks about Icedove

• Talk on DebConf 15 in Heidelberg The State of Icedove - DC15.pdf

?KategorieIcedove