Overview

I have been busy migrating from Windows 7 RC to full retail version of Windows 7. It has taken over 1.5 full days (which includes half a day formatting a brand new 1TB hard drive).

During the course of putting things back onto my speedy fresh install I found a problem when I started up Thunderbird. There were duplicate system folders such as Local Inbox, Sent box, etc. Because they are system folders there is no option to delete. It had been a while since I started it back up from my old install and got some emails in only one of the 2 Inboxes.

After a while I found the problem. It was Dropbox and the way it handles conflicted files / folders.

Prerequisites

Take a back up of the profile which contains everything for a user. This includes emails, settings and more. To find where the user profile is go to Tools > Account Settings.

For each account listed click on the Server Settings and at the bottom on the right side of the window there is a textbox with the label Local directory: Copy the directory after ~\Profiles\. Make sure Thunderbird is not running before a copy is taken.

Do not forget to backup the Local Folders too. Select Local Folders and there is a textbox with the same label.

Removing Duplicate Folders

Close Mozilla Thunderbird if it’s still open. Inside the profiles directory there is a folder called Mail. This is where each email account has it’s own folder and there is also the local folder where emails are stored on the computer. Go into each of those folders and look for files or folders where it has the computer name and the description conflicted copy and a date stamp. Check which copy is the latest version (and where the back up may come in handy) using date time stamp of the file, size of the file and the conflict date stamp. Delete the duplicate or remove the original and rename the conflicted file exactly the same as the original file.

Summary

A slight pain but it’s worth it if it allows me to access my email offline on multiple computers.

I have just published version 0.4 of energy@home. It includes Twitter integration and a new graph which shows how much energy was used for each hour of the day.

energy@home project page

It’s been a while since I have mentioned the project energy@home I have been working on so I thought I’d share the latest picture of what it looks like.

I will soon be tagging and release a new version with the major difference form 0.3 is triggers. Triggers allows data only to be captured if certain conditions are met or exceeded. This saves saving data which has not changed much.

Next step is to get pre-triggering working where if a trigger condition is met then the data leading up to the trigger event gets logged and certain amount of data is stored after the trigger. This allows a user to view data leading up to the event, the event itself which caused the trigger and the leading data after the event.

Improvements to the UI is needed to. I would like the graph settings to be more customizable and get the data table to work so users can inspect the raw values for themselves.

Special thanks goes to Chris Noon for data acquisition techniques which lead me to using triggers.

energy@home project page

Overview

I have had a Dropbox account for a while now but never really used it till now. There have been really good tricks and uses to Dropbox posted on the Internet and I finally decided to try my hands at synchronising my emails.

Dropbox Setup

Install Dropbox and create an account. I am using the free 2GB as my total mail folder size is less than 2GB. Head over to https://www.getdropbox.com and follow the instructions for installing Dropbox. I will assume the Dropbox folder is set to default which is ~\username\My Dropbox in Windows or ~/username/Dropbox in Ubuntu Linux.

Mozilla Thunderbird Setup

I am assuming this already exists. If not go to http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/ and install it.

Sync Setup On Windows

Close down Mozilla Thunderbird program. I would recommend creating a directory for your emails within the Dropbox directory. I named mine Thunderbird e.g C:\Users\username\My Dropbox\Thunderbird

At a minimum the default profile needs to be copied to the Dropbox directory. Copy: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles to C:\Users\username\My Dropbox\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default

xxxxxxxx.default = a random filename with .default at the end of the folder name.

Other files may be copied under the My Dropbox\Thunderbird directory such as email notification sounds so it is always backed up and sync’d across.

Point Thunderbird to the new location of your profile by starting Thunderbird with the following arguments thunderbird.exe -ProfileManager This can be done by creating / editing a Thunderbird shortcut or Start Menu > Run dialog

Create a new profile and click Next > button on the wizard pop up window. Select Choose Folder… and locate the xxxxxxxx.default directory in My Dropbox directory and press finish.

You may delete the old user or select the new user and click on Start Thunderbird button.

Sync Setup On Ubuntu / Linux

All the steps are the same as Windows setup except for the different file paths and to start the profile manger user mozilla-thunderbird -ProfileManager in the command line.

The default profile directory in Ubuntu is located in /home/username/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.default