wanderingken.com

I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client - it’s free, it’s simple, and it works on both my PC and MacBook, making it easy to transfer account settings back and forth. Heck, it’s even open source, to make me warm and fuzzy inside.

One drawback, however, is that Thunderbird doesn’t automatically support iCalendar attachments of the sort sent by Outlook and others, and if inline attachments aren’t turned on (and they aren’t by default), your messages appear as if the attachment didn’t exist. I’d had a nagging suspicion that I was getting invites I hadn’t seen, and it was confirmed when I missed a meeting folks thought I should know about…

Thankfully, there’s a nice solution to this problem, but it wasn’t completely straightforward and it required an adventure through google-land, forums and such, so I thought I’d document it here.

First, install the Mozilla Lightning plugin. You’ll have to download it to your local machine, navigate to tools / add ons in Thunderbird, select the plugin from your local directory, install it, and then restart Thunderbird. This will build a calendar app into your Thunderbird environment (notice the calendar button on the bottom left) and .ics (iCalendar) attachments should now appear as message attachments.

The next step is to get these attachments into the calendar. If you’ve already displaying attachments inline, great, otherwise, navigate to Tools / Options / General and click on Config Editor. Then, find the preference called ‘mail.inline_attachments’, and set it to true (dbl-click should do).

Now, if you open a message with an iCalendar attachment, Lightning will nicely ask you if you want to accept or decline the event. Perfect!