Thursday, March 06, 2008

Trillian, Firefox, Yahoo Mail, and Vista

What a mess... The proverbial "perfect storm". Here's the story:

The Trillian client is a program that aggregates several IM protocols. Great little tool. When it recognizes mail in Yahoo or Hotmail accounts, it reports, and allows one click access to the webmail screen. A few weeks ago, this feature stopped working, after a Firefox upgrade.

I thought it was Firefox, but as it turns out, its Vista. (Surprise, surpise, surprise.) The way Trillian provides access to the webmail screen is by creating an HTML document that redirects to Yahoo Mail. The HTML contains the authentication information (most likely as arguments to a CGI post.) Trillian then hands the HTML document to Firefox, who spawns a new tab. Since the failure, Firefox reports "file not found".

The problem is that Vista has set read only permissions on:
  C:/Program Files/Trillian/users/default/cache
By setting the permissions for "everyone" "Full Access", the problem is resolved.

How do we do it?
1. Browse to the default folder and right click on cache.
2. Select Properties and the Security tab.
3. In the Groups or User names pane, highlight Users and click Edit.
4. In the pop-up window, again select Users and check Full control.
5. Click OK and OK to exit both windows and close the default window.

7 comments:

  1. YES!!!! Thank you so much!!

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  2. I am forever in awe as to how anyone figures any of this out. Thank you so much for posting your solution!

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  3. Glad you have this posted, I would have never guessed it was something easy like that.

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  4. Sorry to be ignorant - but when you said "browse to the default folder" - where do you do that? in Trillian? Control panel? thank you

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  5. In Vista, best way to "browse to the default folder" is Windows Explorer. You can also go through "My Computer", "C Drive", and click the folders: Program Files, Trillian, users, default.

    Hope the clarification helps.

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  6. Manuel Garcia6/09/2009 12:19 PM

    This is the solution I was looking for.
    I just gave it write permissions to the cache and it worked for me.

    Thank you very much.

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  7. U r da bomb! Thx so much!

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