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Thunderbried 3.0.x: make it download ONLY the selected folders

(Third and final Thunderbird post (promise!))

I had an idea; maybe if I deleted TB, then restarted it, and forced it to go offline first, THEN configured folders, THEN allowed it to connect, it might. just. work.

Of course, doing so discovered some obvious bugs in TB. Sigh. I got it mostly working in the end, after some false starts. So, if this is something you want to try, here’s how to do it:

1. Start TB, and give it your account details.

You want it to look like this (see note above; if you don’t do this correctly, you’ll get different settings, with no SSL/TLS)

Picture 95

2. QUICKLY go to offline mode (next step) or … unplug your internet cable – this may be easier

Why on *earth* do you have to do this?

Well … there’s a major bug in TB. If you do NOT create an account *the first time the app launches*, then you can never create a Gmail account. The code that configures email accounts *will not run* after that first launch.

Really, I’m serious: try it. It will – if you’re lucky – try to configure your gmail account with all encryption turned off, thereby sharing your emails with everyone on the network. Nothing you can do will make it accept SSL/TLS. Even typing the port number manually, it fails to work.

BUT … if you allow it to configure the account on first-run, it will correctly setup everything as SSL/TLS

3. Go to offline mode

Picture 96

4. Go to Synchronization settings (from the same menu – File menu)

Picture 97

Click the ADVANCED button (it’s not advanced, it’s basic, but this is a hangover from the Mozilla Mail days, when the GUI for configuring the app was poorly arranged)

5. De-select the folders that Thunderbird should never have pre-selected in the first place

NB: this is language dependent! Google “kindly” names some of these folders depending on your regional language. Great idea, unfortunately it makes config / instructions a bit more tricky.

In the UK (this is different in USA!), the folders you must untick are:

  • Bin
  • Trash
  • [Google Mail]
  • [Google Mail]Bin

Like this:
Picture 98

and this:

6. Are you finished ? No, you aren’t; There’s some “magic” folders left…

On the left, under Inbox, there are a couple of magic folders that don’t appear in the synch list – but will synch automatically, and kill your disk space. One of them in particular: “All Mail” (that is: every single email that Gmail has for you, ever, anywhere. All unsorted)

You have to right-click, and go to the 3rd tab, and deselect the checkbox, to make this safe:

Picture 101

You MUST also do a difficult one – the Trash folder.

Thunderbird will *not allow you* to deselect this one, but you have to expand it, and inside find the “Bin” and “Trash” folders, and manually deselect them as with “All Mail”.

Picture 102

NB: in the attached screenshot, I hadn’t realised this was needed, so you can see it’s downloaded my whole Trash folder from the server. Ugh.

NB: yes, in theory you have *already* deselected those folders. But with Gmail you can easily end up with two copies of the folders, both with the same name, but in different subfolders. Depends which clients you’ve used with Gmail in the past (ironically, in my case, they exist because I ran an earlier version of Thunderbird, where the Gmail integration wasn’t so good).

(you may also want to do the same for Sent Mail and Spam – depending on personal preference / need)

Picture 100

7. Finally (finally!) you can de-enable Work Offline, from the File menu

Now what?

Well, nothing happens. Because Thunderbird is “magic!”.

If you wait long enough, and you’re lucky, it will magically start to synch.

If you don’t like waiting, staring at a computer, you can force it to download – go to the File menu, and from the Offline submenu, select Download now.

HOWEVER once again there are issues: this will work outside the normal Activity Window system, so your download will be in the foreground, and doesn’t even appear as an “Activity”. Sigh. So, you might want to try waiting for the “magic” to happen instead, and hope you get lucky.

(in theory, it should be a 10 minute wait at most, but earlier versions of TB 3 used to have severe problems with this, sometimes never synching at all)

Summary

This is still imperfect. Thunderbird insists on “indexing” all 5,000 of my Sent Mail contents – although at least it’s no longer trying to download them all locally. It also insists on “indexing” the contents of things like “All Mail”, which is completely incorrect.

But I can find no way to remove the annoying “All Mail” folder, and if you ever click on it accidentally, then BAM! the expensive processing starts. The best you can do is use the little buttons at the top left hand side to switch mode to ”

Oh – and you aren’t allowed to stop it. The Activity Manager is missing a feature (which is already in bug reports from last year – I remember seeing people ask for it) : a “click to cancel” button for each activity.

Hopefully, though, so long as you remember to avoid clicking on those magic folders, you can at least make TB work normally…

Ditto for all the folders we chose not to download locally … and, ditto, I can’t find a way to remove them from the list, so there’s no way to stop myself from accidentally clicking one.

There are a few other things you should do too, to make up for the incorrect GMail setup. For instance, you should go to Thunderbird settings, and DISABLE the “save copy of messages in Sent folder”, because GMail will automatically do that on the server side anyway.

PS: … ARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

I was just about to press the post button, when I noticed something horrific.

TB just started downloading the 5,000 emails in a “Bin” folder … somewhere … despite my very clear instructions not to.

This is a buggy load of crap. Try the workarounds listed in this post – see if they work for you. But, ultimately “Don’t use it” is my advice.

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fixing your desktop

Thunderbird (Firefox email): REALLY doesn’t work, catastrophically

When you run Thunderbird, and connect to gmail, it downloads your inbox.

Then it does nothing, for an hour or so.

When you run Thunderbird a second or third time, OR when you first synch a single IMAP folder (I don’t know which of these two events triggered it) it waits a minute, and then spontaneously downloads your entire GMAIL account. Since Google makes it very hard to delete emails, this probably amounts to a huge amount of data.

It also means downloading two (or more) copies of everything that has a label.

If you tell it NOT to download folders, it ignores you and downloads them anyway.

On my laptop, I don’t have several gigabytes of spare storage to carry every piece of random crap ever sent to me on Gmail. I cannot run Thunderbird. I hereby giveup! I wish they’d dump the “clever” stuff they don’t seem to be able to make work, and just provide a simple, straightforward, “email that does what you tell it to”, and *then* add the rest by plugins…

If you *don’t* use Gmail, TB is looking like a viable option right now (although still lacking features that its predecessor – Mozilla Mail – already had).

(I tried every option on the folder – they all said the folder would NOT be synchronized, even as the activity manager was saying “now downloading 1 of 15,000” (ish))

Categories
fixing your desktop

Thunderbird (Firefox email): still doesn’t work

Thunderbird just released an update a couple of weeks ago, so I thought I’d try it out.

Day 1: Thunderbird refuses to check email. See this screenshot, note the timestamps, while I’m sitting here waiting for an email that should ahve arrived a few minutes ago, desperately pressing the “get mail” button, and thunderbird refuses to do anything at all:

Picture 94

I’m not sure I’ll bother with a day 2; an email client that cannot fetch email is no email client at all.

(although, that said, I’ve noticed a fascinating bug with Google’s iPhone contender (the Nexus One) – it cannot send email, even though it displays a message saying “Sending email…”, unless you switch the phone into a special “synching” mode, or manually tell it to Refresh the inbox; until you do that, the “Sending email…” message displays forever, not actually doing anything. Basic testing that Google apparently forgot to do, sigh)

Categories
games industry startup advice

“Developers outsource publishing to publishers”

Nicholas Lovell suggests it here:

Think about it. It’s your baby, your dream, your idea.

My own way of describing this is:

  • Who owns the IP? (dev, initially)
  • Who invented the IP? (dev)
  • Who – therefore – understands *why* the IP exists, *how* it works, *why* it’s “good”? (dev)
  • Who cares most about the IP? (dev)
  • Who would you trust most to pour their heart into making the most of the IP? (?)
  • …and do so without destroying the bits that made it good and unique in the first place? (?)

Years of publishing have made people come to assume the answer to the last questions is “the publisher” without even thinking about it. It took me very little time working in actual publishers to see first-hand how wrong that is as an answer – in most publishers, most of the staff don’t even play games. At all. They couldn’t care less about the IP’s they are supposedly shepherding and exploiting.

When you speak to people who know nothing about the games industry, they invariably answer “the developer”, as this is the natural answer: the person who invented and nurtured the answer is bound to care more about it, and work harder for it, than anyone else.

These days, now that I believe in hiring on enthusiasm instead of competence, that’s also the answer that will tend to maximize “success” / revenue.

Valete, Publishing industry!

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conferences

My first SXSWi: the “low-brow” conference?

This past few days, as people have asked me “how’s the conference going for you?”, my recurring response has been: I’m ambivalent.

This is my first SXSWi; I go to 3-5 tech and media conferences a year, speak at 1-3 of them. The “party” atmosphere was fun on the first day of events, and unusual, but the evening parties were horrible – massive droves of uninterested and uncaring people crowding-out the much smaller number of people who had a genuine interest in being here and talking about the things they love.

I saw this post from a veteran lamenting how the conference is much larger but much worse this year.

I thought it might be a product of size, but I’ve been to big conferences which still have a really positive atmosphere.

Having been to other Austin conferences, I think it’s an issue of image – how people coming to Austin for the conference already perceive Austin. SXSWi feels like “6th street carried into the convention center”.

Other, smaller, Austin conferences manage to co-exist with the presence of 6th street without inter-mingling with it. If you want to go down 6th while you’re there, you can – but the conference itself exists apart from it. It feels like SXSWi has embraced 6th and forced us all to be part of that, no choice allowed.

If that’s so … I’m not sure what the organizers can do to “fix” it, short of aggressively controlling the marketing for next year, changing the image and the market/audience that they target. With an (alleged) 40% growth in audience attendance … would they want to change it? A lot of people who used to like the “small” SXSWi, and dislike the “large” SXSWi maybe just don’t like large conferences anyway … maybe there *is* no problem.

(although I don’t think so … my impression is that a lot of people came this year because of the same reputation that SXSWi is rapidly throwing away: high quality people, cutting-edge breaking technology / startups)

Personally, in an ideal world? I’d like to see SXSWi 2011 take place in San Francisco. (bearing in mind that I have to fly from Europe, so this isn’t an issue of convenience). SF is big enough to accomodate the influx of people (hotel prices in SF don’t go up by a factor of 3! Unlike Austin right now :( ), and allows for a lot of partying, without the lowest-common-denominator mentality.

Just IMHO…

EDIT: When I said “ambivalent”, I meant it…

…but, being exhausted by that point, I only covered half what I was thinking. The other half was this: there was some great content, I sat in some very interesting talks with good speakers. The conference itself seemed very well organized, coping admirably with the vast number of registrants (they dealt with badge pickup, for instance, extremely well considering the numbers involved).

I know that some people experienced terrible content – for instance, the complaints about the Twitter interview – but I got lucky and skipped all of that. These days, I can usually make a good guess at the quality of a session by the title and the abstract. Sessions that had little real purpose can usually be filtered out this way, whereas sessions with a strong, genuine, theme can be cherry-picked.

So. A lot of the conference I found very enjoyable. But Jolie’s comments struck a chord with me – I was really surprised by the poor social elements of the conf. As noted above, my guess is that this is more to do with the people who attend than it is with the conference itself.

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conferences

Generally speaking, when you mug someone…

…it’s not a good idea to mug someone who practices Kung Fu.

Fortunately, in this case, I’d only slept 3 hours in the previous 40, and it took me long enough to realise what was happening – and I was sufficiently in-attentive – that I didn’t hit back in any serious way.

But if you see me with a black eye and a swollen cheek at GDC, that’s why. Because I was still apologizing after the guy had hit me in the face the third time, and only when he tried to take my bags did I start hitting back. I’ve heard about it before – the “Gentleman martial artist” problem – where you’re too polite to respond when someone hits you in a manner that’s fairly weak compared to what you’re used to, and you find it hard to take the attacker seriously (although it hurts enough afterwards).

Guess I’d better start going to more sparring sessions. Because – frankly – letting yourself get so utterly surprised is a total fail in a martial sense. If the leader had known what he was doing (and I could tell him what he should have done), I’d still be unconscious right now. There’s been a few muggings recently in Brighton – Nik got a fractured cheek for refusing to give up his iPhone (good on you, Nik) – and I tried to catch them, but they ran faster than I with my suitcase and laptop heading off to San Francisco :(.

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conferences games industry

GDC 2010 about to start…I’m there for 3 days

I’ll be in SF from Monday afternoon to Thursday evening (leaving SFO at midnight on thursday night).

My iPhone is unlocked, so I’m hoping to find a cheap SIM to shove in, but otherwise it’ll be email-only.

The 2010 list of GDC parties is looking pretty full (and there’s a bunch after I leave) – if you should be on the calendar, email me ASAP.

ALSO … Sulka and I made a neat little iPhone app that tracks all the parties for you, and tells you where/when they are. We’re just waiting for Apple to approve it, hopefully it’ll be live on Monday. It’s San-Francisco specific right now, but if it works, we’ll expand it to other cities in future.