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Disabling DNS Prefetch in Thunderbird and Firefox


Mozilla Necko based apps (like newer Firefox and Thunderbird) have a little feature that resolves DNS entries for URLs it sees to help speed up things when you click them. This can be used as a web bug, or more important to this page, it can be used to confirm you read the message.


To disable prefetching in Thunderbird and Thunderbird based clients:

Find the
user.js file for Thunderbird (it will be in your Thunderbird profile directory. create one if none exists)

Paste this in:

user_pref("network.dns.disablePrefetch", true);


You may also consider the following, even though not required for the DNS prefetch, nor some even supposed to apply to mail, I like to make sure:

user_pref("network.dns.disablePrefetchFromHTTPS", true);
(
disable from https is supposed to be the default setting anyway, but lets just make sure)
user_pref("network.prefetch-next",false);
user_pref("network.dns.disableIPv6", true);


Save file and exit. You can restart Thunderbird.


To disable prefetching in Firefox
:

Exit Firefox if running.

Find the file
user.js and edit it (it will be in your Firefox profile directory. Create if it does not exist)


Paste this in:

user_pref("network.dns.disablePrefetch", true);


You may also consider the following, even though not required for the DNS prefetch, they are good from a privacy and preventatitve perspective:

user_pref("network.dns.disablePrefetchFromHTTPS", true);
(
disable from https is supposed to be the default setting anyway, but lets just make sure)
user_pref("network.prefetch-next",false);
user_pref("network.dns.disableIPv6", true);


Save file and exit, you can restart Firefox.





Notes: you may also use the about:config editor with the browser or options-general-config_editor for Thunderbird, in addition, future updates or changes could alter these values.

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