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An AppleScript to ease multiple Thunderbird installs Apps
My work (a college) recently switched from the now-bankrupt Mulberry to the nice and free Thunderbird (we would have gone with Mail, but there is no PC version to be had). We wanted to make the install as painless as possible on our Help Desk Staff (student workers). This AppleScript will take a copy of a known good configuration and install it on a different machine. This is my first attempt at writing AppleScripts, so be nice :)

For the script to run correctly, you will need to set up Thunderbird exactly the way that you want it to be, including any custom changes made to the prefs.js file (custom LDAP mappings and such), and then quit Thunderbird to save all the prefs.

Next make a copy of your ~/Library/Thunderbird folder and edit the prefs.js file in the copy's profile directory. Remove all instances of your full name and replace with FULL_NAME. Also change all instances of your user ID to USER_ID. After this is completed, you will then need to zip up both the script and your copy of the Thunderbird prefs (this script does not handle permissions issues, but unzipping seems to do the trick fairly well).

Install for your clients is simple. First install Thunderbird but do not open it. Unzip and run the script. Start Thunderbird and click on Get Mail. This script must be run this from the Desktop (as everything is hard coded), and turn on access for assistive devices in the Universal Access System Preferences panel.

The benefit of this code is that is allows you to install Thunderbird for any user with the same base email address (foo@blah.edu), and you will know that you settings are correct, and custom changes will not need to be made. Also, if you see anyone's example scripts living in here, props to them -- thanks for all the online help I found creating this, even if I do not remember where I got it all.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]
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An AppleScript to ease multiple Thunderbird installs | 4 comments | Create New Account
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script will likely need some customization
Authored by: stevebr on Oct 03, '06 08:15:10AM

I haven't yet tested it, but looking at the script I noticed this line:

set workFolder to "Users:" & theuser & ":Library:Thunderbird:Profiles:washcoll.default:prefs.js" as string

Someone using this will likely need to change the segment "washcoll.default" to the name of the profile directory they are using as the base of the multiple installs. Mozilla apps use random strings in the names of these directories. More information can be found in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base, in this article: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder

Because a given user can have multiple folders (as additional xxxxxxxx.default directories in the Profiles directory), editing the script to use the right name is probably a better solution than tweaking it to discover the name automatically.



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An AppleScript to ease multiple Thunderbird installs
Authored by: mpetit on Oct 03, '06 10:55:08AM

There is a profiles.ini file in ~/Library/Thunderbird where you can define the paths to the profiles and get rid off random profile names.



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An AppleScript to ease multiple Thunderbird installs
Authored by: PCKiller on Oct 03, '06 11:06:43AM

Both of the above comments are correct. I used the .ini file to set washcoll.default as the default profile and as we are only setting up one profile I did not see the harm in setting all of our on campus machines to use the same one since all of the machines are setup for only one user, or have different login accounts.



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An AppleScript to ease multiple Thunderbird installs
Authored by: PCKiller on Oct 03, '06 11:10:45AM

Also for anyone that wants to safely test this script all you will need to do is quit thunderbird, make a backup of your ~/Library/Thunderbird folder (to say the desktop) and run the script. Once you have tested the script just quit Tbird and replace the folder that the script adds with your backup.



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