I’m not sure that I like Thunderbird 3.0. I was a big fan of TB up until 2.x, but with the 3.x version released, I’m not sure. Double click on a message, and look at the (default) buttonbar. Why is there a “write” button, and and “address book” button? Where are reply (all) and forward? Oh, they are in the message-header-block, but why can’t I remove them there? Why don’t the previous/next buttons work properly (not even with add-ons)? What’s the fuss about tabbed reading? Why would I want tabbed email-reading? There is a smart-folders reading mode, but where can I see/setup how smart I want TB to be? Why is the “new” button renamed to “write”? Write an event? And what’s with the hint texts: Write event hints “create a new message”, write task hints “create a new message”? Why can’t I see my calender AND my email in one view, why can’t I disable the tabs?

Adding features is never really a bad thing, but don’t touch thing that work. And have worked for decades. Don’t reinvent the wheel. A round one is just fine on our planet.

Did a custom build of Thunderbird yesterday, since openSUSE comes with version 3.0b4 and that’s not recognized by all plugins. It took me a while to figure out how to get rid of the annoying “Shredder” name, but at last I found it: it’s in some files in the branding directory. Once you change those, and do a rebuild, Thunderbird is called Thunderbird again.

Today I updated my Outlook Unsafe Attachment Unlocker utility. For some reason I noticed the select-all checkmark did not toggle. It only did a Select-All, but not an Unselect-All. Now it does. And the context-menu now points to the correct address of this weblog. Get it here.

When I get my hands on an Office 2007, I’ll see whether the utility can be made Office 2007 compatible.

I still get a lot of search hits from people looking for a way to change the extensions that cannot be viewed in Outlook, because Microsoft decided in all her wisdom to mark a lot of extensions as “unsafe”. In Outlook Express there is a nice dialog to change this behaviour, in Outlook there is not. You can do it by editing the registry by hand, but a lot of people are afraid to do so.

For that reason, I created ouau.exe, or “Outlook Unsafe Attachments Unblocker”. It detects your Office version (which you can override) and lists the extension so you can block/unblock them. There’s a handy “select all” radiobutton that will save you some clicking.

Here is a screenshot.

Click here to download the program. It’s in WinRAR format, so you need to extract it first.

OUAU should now work for all Office versions, and you can select the Office version (if for some reason you have partial Office installations) and it will reread and write the appropriate registry-entry.

Changes

• Ability to change Office version by using the radiobuttons
• Added link to this blog in context-menu

To do

• Close the application when unsupported Office version is detected (detection and errormessage is already in place)

I tried ouau here at work, and we’re using Office 2002/XP. It finds the correct Office version, I’m able to make changes to the blocked extensions, which I can verify by restarting the program: it finds the new settings. But the new registry-setting resort no effect: right-click and send-to-mail-recipient of a unblocked extension (e.g. .EXE) still results in Outlook saying that the attachments are potentially unsafe. What’s going on here? Something to do with (group)policies?

Update: I think I already know: Exchange administrators can add/remove Level 1 and/or Level 2 extensions within the Exchange-server settings. This can not be overruled by the Outlookclient. So, I guess I’ll have to find another way to test other Office versions.

Another update to OUAU, now version 1.0.5.0.

Changes:

• Detection of Office 2000
• Detection of Office 2002/XP
• Detection of Office 2003

To do:

• When user selects an Office version other than detected, modify the correct registry-entries, instead of detected version
• Close the application when unsupported Office version is detected (detection and errormessage is already in place)

Minor update to ouau, bringing it to version 1.0.4.0.

Changes:

• All extensions show a description as tooltip when hovering the extension
• When “Select all” is checked and an extension is unchecked, “Select all” will be unchecked as well
• New Icon

My Office tool ouau has been upped to version 1.0.3.0. Changes are:

- Has a decent icon
- Ability to unblock all the extensions as listed in this MSDN-page
- Ability to “Select all”

Tim heeft ouau getest, en zegt dat het niet werkt. Hij heeft Office 2002 (XP). In TweakXP is wel te zien dat alle extensies zijn vrijgegeven. Klopt helemaal Tim, ouau werkt op dit moment alleen maar met Office 2003 (interne versie 11.0). Ik zal zo snel mogelijk zorgen dat alle Office versies vanaf 2000 werken.