Get a detailed log of all Thunderbird network traffic

If you are using the Thunderbird email desktop client on your system, you may have noticed that it does not really reveal a lot about connections that it makes.
While you do see when it is retrieving or sending emails, only the email address used for the operation is displayed, while connections to mail servers are not.
The only other information that you have access to by default are the email headers that you can display to inspect one particular message in detail.
If you want more information, then your only bet until now was to monitor your computer's firewall or use another network traffic monitoring software to do so.
The TBTracer extension for Thunderbird changes this, as it is adding network traffic information directly to the application.
The first thing that you need to do after installation is to open the options of the extension, by selecting Tools > Add-ons, and clicking on the options button next to TBTracer.
Monitor Thunderbird network traffic
Here you need to set the environment variables and restart the email client after they have been found.
Once that is out of the way, you can load the monitoring window with a click on Tools > TBTracer.
The extension captures http, imap, pop3, smtp and nntp connections by default and displays them as they happen in the monitoring window. You can disable some protocols in the preferences if you want to reduce the amount of data displayed by the extension.
I highly recommend that you open the styles tab in the options as well and modify them as you see fit, as some default styles make the output hard to read (especially http connections with their shadow effect).
You can hit the stop button in the tracing interface at any time to stop the recording to the log. This can be useful to investigate events without having to cope with new data flooding the window.
Here you can also use the search at the top to filter results. If you are interested to find out more about a particular email address, connection type or other connection, then you can use it to make sure that only it is displayed in the window.
The one thing that is problematic here is that there are no scrollbars. You can -- and should -- enable them in the options under general, as you are left with navigating the window with the keyboard otherwise which is not as precise as using the mouse.
The extension ignores mail attachments by default. If you want them included, open the attachments tab in the interface and change the preference from "leave alone" to "decode and feed to renderer".
Other preferences that you may find useful are to show POST data and HTTP response data, include gzip content-encoding in the log output, or to block the extension from updating when it is not displayed.
Verdict
It can be quite useful to monitor network traffic in Thunderbird. It is useful for extension developers for example, but also for security conscious users who want to check the connections the email client makes from time to time to make sure that it has not been tampered with.
Now Read: Change the font of emails in Thunderbird
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You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!