Making file:// links work in thunderbird

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 05:02:25 GMT

I use thunderbird 1.5 as my mail reader, and it is always bugged me that clicks on file:// links in emails are ignored - these are frequently used internally within Sun, for example code reviews are usually done with a tool called webrev which builds a tree of HTML pages containing the diffs, and the file:// links are usually mailed out to reviewers. A spot of light googling revealed this page on the topic for firefox, and although the page implied the same configuration settings were also used by thunderbird, it wasn't quite clear how to apply the technique to mails read from an IMAP server. Hmm.

To try to figure out what was going on I opened up the thunderbird JavaScript console (on the Tools menu) and clicked on a file:// link in an email. The following error message appeared:

Security Error: Content at imap://mailserver.uk.sun.com:143/fetch%3EUID%3.INBOX%3E8620 may not load or link to file:///net/foo.uk.sun.com/export/8475639/webrev/index.html.

So I surmised that what I needed to do was to tell thunderbird to trust links from my IMAP server, so I added the following to my user.js file:

// Allow file:// links
user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "imap://mailserver.uk.sun.com:143");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled", "allAccess");

restarted thunderbird, and clicking on file:// links now worked. Note that there are a number of good security-related reasons as to why this isn't enabled by default, so use it at your own risk!

Alan's Ramblings - thunderbird tag

Making file:// links work in thunderbird