Mozilla Thunderbird Tips & Tricks

Adding support for new languages to the spellchecker

Default builds of Mozilla Thunderbird from mozilla.org come with only an US English spellchecking dictionary. One can easily add new dictionaries by placing any dictionary in myspell format (this usually means two files: *.aff and *.dic) in <thunderbird-home>/components/myspell/ directory. Since the format used (myspell) is the same as OpenOffice uses, one can simply remove <thunderbird-home>/components/myspell/ completely and instead make a symlink with the same name pointing to <openoffice-home>/share/dict/ooo/, where OpenOffice stores its dictionaries. This way, all dictionaries installed for OpenOffice are immediately made available to the Thunderbird spellchecker.

Fixing problems with fonts

If some characters displayed by Mozilla (including Thunderbird and Firefox) seem to come from different fonts than the font used for the rest of the text, configuring FontConfig usually helps.