Installing Dictionaries in Thunderbird

I wanted the Australian English dictionary installed in Thunderbird. Following the instruction on the mozilla website I downloaded the spell-en-AU.xpi file, and installed it from the Tools -> Extensions dialog. I now had the dictionary claiming it was installed, but not actually working. “Colour” was still a spelling mistake.

You can use unzip to extract the files from an xpi, so I grabbed the actual dictionary files and placed them in ‘/usr/lib/thunderbird-1.5.0.5/components/myspell/’. Yet it still didn’t work.

After a bit of frustration I tried one more thing. I ran thunderbird as root, and installed the xpi file through the normal dialog. It worked. I now have Australian spelling as an option in thunderbird as any user.