Thunderbird Portable Launcher 1.3.8.0 ===================================== Copyright 2004-2007 John T. Haller of PortableApps.com Calendar and Chromepath Copyright 2004 mai9 Website: http://PortableApps.com/ThunderbirdPortable This software is OSI Certified Open Source Software. OSI Certified is a certification mark of the Open Source Initiative. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. ABOUT THUNDEBIRD PORTABLE ========================= The Thunderbird Portable Launcher allows you to run Thunderbird from a removable drive whose letter changes as you move it to another computer. The email client and the profile can be entirely self-contained on the drive and then used on any Windows computer. Specific configuration changes are made to the chrome.rdf so that your extensions will still work as the drive letter changes. LICENSE ======= This code is released under the GPL. Within the ThunderbirdPortableSource directory you will find the code (ThunderbirdPortable.nsi) as well as the full GPL license (License.txt). If you use the launcher or code in your own product, please give proper and prominent attribution. INSTALLATION / DIRECTORY STRUCTURE ================================== By default, the program expects the following directory structure: -\ <--- Directory with ThunderbirdPortable.exe +\App\ +\thunderbird\ +\gpg\ (optional) +\Data\ +\plugins\ +\profile\ +\gpg\ (optional) +\userprofile\ (optional) It can be used in other directory configurations by including the ThunderbirdPortable.ini file in the same directory as ThunderbirdPortable.exe and configuring it as details in the INI file section below. THUNDERBIRDPORTABLE.INI CONFIGURATION ================================= The Thunderbird Portable Launcher will look for an ini file called ThunderbirdPortable.ini within its directory. If you are happy with the default options, it is not necessary, though. There is an example INI included with this package to get you started. The INI file is formatted as follows: [ThunderbirdPortable] ThunderbirdDirectory=App\thunderbird ThunderbirdExecutable=thunderbird.exe AdditionalParameters= GPGPathDirectory=App\gpg ProfileDirectory=Data\profile PluginsDirectory=Data\plugins SettingsDirectory=Data\settings GPGHomeDirectory=Data\gpg DisableSplashScreen=false AllowMultipleInstances=false DisableIntelligentStart=false SkipChromeFix=false SkipCompregFix=false RunLocally=false The ThunderbirdDirectory, ProfileDrectory, PluginsDirectory and SettingsDirectory entries should be set to the *relative* path to the directories containing Thunderbird.exe, your profile, your plugins, etc. from the current directory. All must be a subdirectory (or multiple subdirectories) of the directory containing ThunderbirdPortable.exe. The default entries for these are described in the installation section above. The GPGPathDirectory and GPGHomeDirectory allow you to specify paths to the GPG binaries and your keyring/trustdbs for using GPG with the Enigmail extension. The ThunderbirdExecutable entry allows you to set the Thunderbird Portable Launcher to use an alternate EXE call to launch Thunderbird. This is helpful if you are using a machine that is set to deny Thunderbird.exe from running. You'll need to rename the Thunderbird.exe file and then enter the name you gave it on the Thunderbirdexecutable= line of the INI. The AdditionalParameters entry allows you to pass additional commandline parameter entries to Thunderbird.exe. Whatever you enter here will be appended to the call to hunderbird.exe. The LocalHomepage entry allows you to set Thunderbird Portable to use a local file on your portable drive as your homepage. The file must be a path relative to the launcher. If you were to set it to a file in the same directory as ThunderbirdPortable.exe, you would use LocalHomepage=homepage.html If it was in a subdirectory called homepage, you would enter LocalHomepage=homepage/homepage.html If it were in a directory above ThunderbirdPortable.exe, it would be LocalHomepage=../homepage.html The DisableSplashScreen entry allows you to run the Thunderbird Portable Launcher without the splash screen showing up. The default is false. The AllowMultipleInstances entry will allow Thunderbird Portable to run alongside your regular local copy of Thunderbird if you set it to true (lowercase). The default is false. This will disable the registry handling ability of the launcher, so Thunderbird may check if it is the default mail client. For this reason, use of AllowMultipleInstance is not normally recommended for PCs you don't own. The DisableIntelligentStart entry allows you to to have Thunderbird Portable run its chrome and component registry fixes on every start. Normally, it tracks when you've moved to a new path (switching PCs for instance) and only processes the chrome and component registry when you do. By skipping it when the path is the same, Thunderbird Portable starts up faster. But, if you copy a profile into Thunderbird Portable between sessions (it handles a copy in on first run automatically), it won't know to process these. This usually happens if you copy a profile into Thunderbird Portable from your local PC on a regular basis with a sync utility that doesn't work with Thunderbird Portable (like Portable Apps Sync does). Setting this to true causes Thunderbird Portable to process each on every start. The SkipChromeFix entry allows you to set Thunderbird Portable not to adjust the chrome.rdf for extension compatibility on launch. Set it to true (lowercase) to skip chrome.rdf processing. The default is false. The SkipCompregFix entry allows you to set Thunderbird Portable not to adjust the component registry (compreg.dat) for certain extension compatibility on launch. It is useful if you are not using extensions which make use of the component registry (like Forecast Fox or the Mozilla Calendar) as Thunderbird Portable will launch more quickly. Set it to true (lowercase) to skip chrome.rdf processing. The default is false. The RunLocally entry allows you to set Thunderbird Portable to copy your profile, plugins and Thunderbird binaries to the local machine's temp directory. This can be useful for instances where you'd like to run Thunderbird Portable from a CD (aka Thunderbird Portable Live) or when you're working on a machine that may have spyware or viruses and you'd like to keep your device set to read-only mode. The only caveat is, of course, that any changes you make that session (settings, email downloaded, etc) aren't saved back to your device. When done running, the local temp directories used by Thunderbird Portable are removed. Setting RunLocally to true automatically sets WaitForThunderbird to true. RunLocally does not currently work with AllowMultipleInstances as it cannot track which version of Thunderbird is running. PROGRAM HISTORY / ABOUT THE AUTHORS =================================== This launcher contains elements from multiple sources. It began as a batch file launcher written by myself (John T. Haller) and posted to the mozillaZine.org thread about running Firefox from a USB key. tracon later released a launcher called fflaunch which I enhanced and re-released as Portable Firefox. mai9 later improved on fflaunch's techniques and released it as Free The Fox. Multiple suggestions back and forth as well as improvements from mai9, myself and others lead to the launcher we have today. The current versions is more original work by myself, but still builds on some of the original ideas. CURRENT LIMITATIONS =================== INCOMPATIBLE EXTENSIONS - Certain extensions use additional local files or prefs.js to store information, neither of which are handled by the Thunderbird Portable launcher when moving between machines.
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