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Opening thunderbird from cli in a mailbox with space in name

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With a running thunderbird (115.3.2), I can use the CLI command

thunderbird -mail "imap://...@.../testing"

to have it switch to the IMAP folder "testing".

However, I cannot get it to work with folders containing a space, e.g.

thunderbird -mail "imap://...@.../00 Current" thunderbird -mail "imap://...@.../00%20Current" thunderbird -mail imap://...@.../00%20Current

all fail to switch to the existing IMAP folder "00 Current" (Thunderbird lists the address of this folder as imap://...@.../00%20Current under properties).

Is there any better way to escaping space (as well as other characters)?

Thank you very much in advance!

With a running thunderbird (115.3.2), I can use the CLI command thunderbird -mail "imap://...@.../testing" to have it switch to the IMAP folder "testing". However, I cannot get it to work with folders containing a space, e.g. thunderbird -mail "imap://...@.../00 Current" thunderbird -mail "imap://...@.../00%20Current" thunderbird -mail imap://...@.../00%20Current all fail to switch to the existing IMAP folder "00 Current" (Thunderbird lists the address of this folder as imap://...@.../00%20Current under properties). Is there any better way to escaping space (as well as other characters)? Thank you very much in advance!

All Replies (4)

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My reading of http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments_-_Thunderbird indicates that the URI must be for a specific email, not a folder. The Current part looks more like a maildir location that an individual mail.

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Thanks for the reply. Yes, this was my initial reading, but being a bit desperate for this feature, I just tried it, and it seems to be working flawlessly for folders without a space in them, at least for IMAP. So I wondered if I'm missing a trick with escaping the space character.

Is there any better solutions for this? Perhaps somebody knows a plugin? Maybe running thunderbird in marionette mode may be an option, but I haven't seen much documentation/examples for this. I'd be very grateful for any pointers.

Modified by Christian Saemann

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There are lots of suggestions online for escaping spaces on Linux. One is to insert \ before a space, e.g.

00\ Current

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Thanks for your reply. Yes, I tried all possibilities that I could think of: %20, backslash in front of space, replacing by underscore, etc. but unfortunately, nothing seemed to work.