Thunderbird: Enable Logging for Multiple Protocols How-To.
Often you will find yourself in situation that needs a little bit of debugging. I am today, something in my Icedove mail client(thunderbird) is not right, keeps connecting to the server with 15 - 30 connections at the same time, so I wanted to know what’s going on. I figured maybe there will be some options available in the program, however, it’s not there.
Surprisingly, logging of Thunderbird has to be done outside the program. Here’s how I did it, on both Debian and Windows machine.
On Debian
All you need to do is prepare a shell script on your desktop, double click it to run Thunderbird instead of your previous desktop icon. Name the file runTB.sh, or any name you prefer.
Codes:
#!/bin/sh
MYDATE=`date ”+%Y%m%d_%H%M%S”`
NSPR_LOG_MODULES=POP3:4,SMTP:4
NSPR_LOG_FILE=~/Desktop/icedove_${MYDATE}.log
export NSPR_LOG_MODULES NSPR_LOG_FILE
/usr/bin/icedove &
exit $?
As simple as that. Please remember that the name “icedove” is a fork of Thunderbird in Debian. You should not be using this if you are using other distros.
On Windows
Similar approach, we are going to create a Batch file here. Create a text file, name it runTB.txt or any name you prefer. Input following codes into the txt file.
Codes:
set mydate=%date:~-4,4%%date:~-7,2%%date:~-10,2%
set mytime=%time:~0,2%%time:~+3,2%
set NSPR_LOG_MODULES=POP3:4,SMTP:4
set NSPR_LOG_FILE=C:\TBLog\TB_%mydate%_%mytime%.log
start thunderbird
After editing the txt file, change its file extension to .bat instead of .txt. Please note that the log file location can be changed based on your preference.
Available Protocol Options
According to Mozilla Page, available protocols for logging are: IMAP, POP3, NNTP, or SMTP. There is another option “ALL“, which will dump everything into the log file. Use it wisely.
Available Logging Levels
According to above help page. There are,
- 0 = Nothing
- 1 = Always printed
- 2 = error messages
- 3 = warning messages
- 4 = debug messages
Actually, there is also 5, which they did not document. Just take it this way, the greater the number, the more detail will get printed in the log file.
If you need help to understand the log file, please take a look at this page. Please send in your feedback.
References:
http://www.mozilla.org/quality/mailnews/mail-troubleshoot.html
http://wiki.dovecot.org/Debugging/Thunderbird
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Session_logging_for_mail/news
howto, logging, mozilla, thunderbird
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