Thunderbird is a great choice for a mail client on Linux systems if you prefer a GUI, but I had some problems with fonts in the most recent releases. The monospace font used for plain text messages was difficult to read. I opened Edit > Preferences > Display and clicked Advanced to the right of Fonts & Colors. The default font for monospace text was “Monospace”, and that one isn’t terribly attractive.

When I started Thunderbird today, it opened three windows. Each window was identical. I closed two of them and then quit Thunderbird. As soon as I started Thunderbird, I had three windows again.

I found a Mozilla bug report from 2015 that had some tips for getting the additional windows closed. Choose one of the open Thunderbird windows and select Close from the File menu. Do not use ALT-F4 or CTRL-W to close the window.

I’ve been a big fan of Thunderbird for years, but it lacks features in some critical areas. For example, I need Microsoft Exchange and Google Apps connectivity for my mail and contacts, but Thunderbird needs some extensions to make that connectivity easier. There are some great extensions available, but they lack polish since they’re not part of the core product. My muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts in Thunderbird left me fumbling in Evolution.

I talked about the joys of running my own mail server last week only to find that my mail server was broken yesterday. Spamassassin stopped doing DNS lookups for RBL and SPF checks. I had one of these moments:

My logs looked like this: plugin: eval failed: available_nameservers: No DNS servers available! plugin: eval failed: available_nameservers: No DNS servers available! rules: failed to run NO_DNS_FOR_FROM RBL test, skipping: (available_nameservers: [.

I’ve received some very sophisticated phishing emails lately and I was showing some of them to my coworkers. One of my coworkers noticed that my Apple Mail client displays the X-Originating-IP header for all of the emails I receive. You can enter that IP into a whois search and get a better idea of who sent you the message without diving into the headers. If someone that regularly exchanges email with me suddenly has an originating IP in another country that would be unusual for them to travel to, I can approach the message with more caution.