Manage Thunderbird using Group Policy
Well, maybe if you’re one of the thousands of Thunderbird IT administrators, you already know.
Thunderbird is a great addition to the Mozilla family of utilities, but like it’s brother FireFox, there’s no Group Policy support to mass-configure your users and computers.
If you’ve got zillions of desktops, how are you going manage things like:
- Update behavior (turning it off, so users aren’t prompted)
- Ensure Thunderbird is always the default mail client?
- Ensure that spell-check is turned on?
- Ensure Anti-virus protection is turned on?
- Prevent users from picking up web cookies?
… or anything else that’s important to your Thunderbird configuration?
Answer: Without PolicyPak, you’ve got no enterprise-way to deliver these settings and lock down Thunderbird. Watch this video to get a handle on the problem and where PolicyPak can ease the pain.
Our solution isn’t a mere “ADM” template, it’s a true Group Policy extension, with powerful management capabilities. PolicyPak can deliver and enforce Thunderbird settings – the “industrial strength” way you need to using Group Policy.
Our PolicyPak software snaps-in to the Group Policy Editor and is ready to use. You can set key settings (like turning off updates), like what is seen here:
'))
You can ensure that Anti-Virus applications are always working for you, like what is seen here:
'))
And, you can ensure “fit and finish” settings like ensuring that spell-check is on across users who need it most.
'))
Without PolicyPak, you’ve got no way to do this uniformly and ensure your settings. Users won’t know what “secure” or “correctly configured” means – only you do. So be sure to set Thunderbird up correctly using Group Policy.
Besides, once you’re using PolicyPak to manage Mozilla Thunderbird, you’ll also get to manage all your other enterprise desktop applications the same way:Firefox,Java, WinZip,and any custom applications you have. They’re 100% included – absolutely free.
It’s all included when you’re a PolicyPak Professional customer.
PolicyPak was designed by Group Policy MVP Jeremy Moskowitz – who “wrote the book” on Group Policy, runs GPanswers.com, and lives and breathes Group Policy and enterprise software deployments and desktop lockdown.
When you’re ready to get serious about managing Thunderbird using Group Policy, PolicyPak is ready for you.
Manage Thunderbird with Group Policy video transcript
Hi, this is Jeremy Moskowitz, Group Policy MVP and Founder of PolicyPak Software. In this demonstration, I want to show you how to use Thunderbird with regards to PolicyPak.
We’re going to start off again by taking the “PreConfigured PolicyPaks” downloadable off the website. Go into the “Thunderbird” directory and you’ll see the PolicyPak precompiled DLL, “pp-ThunderBird.dll.” As we do in our other videos, you’re going to simply copy this to your “C:\Program Files\PolicyPak\Extensions” folder. Go ahead and do that now. There we go.
Now that that’s done, we’re now able to for our “Sales/East Sales Users” for instance, we’re going to use Active Directory and Group Policy to “Create a GPO.” Let’s see, we’ll talk about this and call this “Lock Down Thunderbird.” OK, we’ll right click over that guy and click “Edit…” here.
Actually, before we go in here, let’s talk about some common scenarios. Let’s go into “Thunderbird” here as a user and see what a user can experience here. I don’t have it all setup, but it’ll be good enough for our talks here. If I go to “Tools/Options…” and I go to the “Composition” here under “Spelling,” you probably want to have “Check spelling before sending.” That’s not a bad idea, so we’ll ensure that both of these options are always enforced on.
Let’s go over to “Security” and “Anti-Virus.”Maybe we want to make sure the checkmark is always checked to “Allow anti-virus clients to quarantine individual incoming messages.” Under “Advanced/General” here, we want to make sure that, well gosh, I think it’s probably pretty important to “Always check to see if Thunderbird is the default mail client on startup.” That sounds pretty important also.
So we’re going to make sure that these things are always checked, even if a user tries to work around them. So let’s go ahead now on our Active Directory go to “PolicyPak/Applications/New/Application.” There’s “PolicyPak for Mozilla Thunderbird.” We’ll go ahead and double click that guy. We’re looking for “Composition_Spelling.” There we go. We want to make sure both of those checkmarks are checked on. That seems pretty important for us.
We’ll go over to “Advanced_General” here. We want to make sure that “Always check to see if Thunderbird is the default mail client on startup.” Let’s not forget about our “Security_AntiVirus.” We want to make sure that we want to “Allow anti-virus clients to quarantine individual incoming messages.”
So we’ve got all those guys set up now. We’ve locked and loaded it into the Group Policy Object. Now let’s run GPUpdate on this client machine. Now again, you could be logging off and logging back on. You could be changing job roles. You could be just waiting in the background. You could be logging onto a totally new machine. You will always get Group Policy, and because you get Group Policy you’re going to get the PolicyPak configurations.
Now that we’ve done that, let’s go ahead and click on “Thunderbird” here, and let’s make sure we see what we can see here. Let’s go ahead and clear that out. We’ll go to “Tools/Options…” here. We’ll go ahead and click on the “Composition/Spelling.” Sure enough, they’re both checked. Excellent.We’ll go over to “Security.” Yep, we’ve got that guy checked as well. When we went to “Advanced,” that guy was already checked.
Now let’s be a bad person and uncheck that guy. We’ll go back to “Composition/Spelling” and uncheck these guys. We’ll go over to “Security/Anti-Virus” and uncheck that – things that we shouldn’t do. Now if we’re being a bad user, the very next time Group Policy applies it’s going to reapply these settings. That’s the point of PolicyPak. Even if they’re offline, we’ve got a command line utility to guarantee those settings to come right back.
Now that that’s all done, we’ll just rerun “Thunderbird” again. We’ll go to “Tools/Options…” here. Sure enough, that guy, the “Allow anti-virus clients to quarantine individual incoming messages” checkbox is checked. We’ll go over to “Composition/Spelling.” Sure enough, we’re all back to normal the way we directed it. If we go to “Advanced,” sure enough“Always check to see if Thunderbird is the default mail client on startup.”
So using Group Policyand PolicyPak, you’re going to deliver the settings to your client machines just like that. That’s the point of PolicyPak. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video and you’ll take a look at some of our others. Thanks so much.
