Thanks to Mozilla’s new philosophy of publishing new major releases every month or so, SocialMail has been a little behind the times for a little while.   However I am pleased to say that there is finally a new version which:

• Is Thunderbird 7 Compatible
• May work with Thunderbird 8, but not tested, I’ve just incremented the version compatibility as it should work
• Fixes some problems with international characters in contact’s names (Thanks to Frank who reported this)
• I can’t test this myself as I have no contacts with European names, so I’d appreciate any feedback

Thats it for the moment, I’ve been flat out with the day job, family stuff and other commitments, I’m just not getting much time for coding.  Hopefully that will change soon…

Get it here: socialmail-0.6.3b

-Daniel

I’ve finally gotten round to testing SocialMail with Thunderbird 6, and everything seems to work fine.

That said, I know a few people have tried making it work and met with mixed success.   So I’m doing the only thing I can think of, publish a fresh copy (which works for me on Linux) and see if it starts working for everyone else.   So could you please download this version: SocialMail0.6.2b (hosted on AMO)

EDIT: If you have trouble with the first link, try this instead: social_mail-0.6.2b (hosted here)

Let me know how it works for you and please post your Thunderbird version and OS so I can work out where the problem is if people are still having issues.

-Daniel

After a little digging around I’ve been able to get to the bottom of the conflict between SocialMail and the new Conversations plugin.   It turns out that as Conversation replaces the message view pane in thunderbird, it clobbers a number of events that other plugins may be using.    In my case it was the “MsgMsgDisplayed” event which triggered when a new message was rendered.

Fortunately the authors of Conversations took this into account and provided another hook to enable plugins like SocialMail to interact with it.  Here are the details for anyone that is interested http://blog.xulforum.org/index.php?post/2010/11/27/Thunderbird-Conversations-plugins

With that done, here is a new version of SocialMail, now compatible with Thunderbird Conversations!   SocialMail_0_61

-Daniel

After far too long, I am happy to release a new ‘preview’ version of SocialMail.

This release is considerably reworked from the previous versions, here are a few of the highlights:

• Thunderbird 5 compatibility (not as easy as it sounds), while retaining Thunderbird 3
• A new front tab, showing a timeline of communications from the selected contact.  At the moment this only includes emails at twitter tweets, but there will be more to come.
• A much more functional context menu system
• Attachment lists should be much more complete, gathering information from the internal Gloda database

Please keep in mind that this is a ‘preview’ release (pre-beta),  it hasn’t been tested thoroughly and I accept no responsibility for any problems that it causes

To try out the new version, click on the following link, save it and install into Thuderbird in the usual manner:  SocialMail v0.6

Finally please post your experience, if something doesn’t work as expected let me know, and share your thoughts on the new timeline panel.

-Daniel

Hi All,

Sorry for the long delay with posting an update, life gets a bit busy sometimes.
The SocialMail redevelopment is well underway here’s a summary of what I plan to release in the next few versions (no timeline as yet):
-New front panel showing a timeline of the contacts information (emails, tweets, etc) in chronological order
-Improving the display of all elements to be a bit crisper and more functional
-Context menu improvements
-replacing per network tabs with popup panels, cleaner look and less clutter
-A better way to attach contacts to social networks (this may have to wait until the 2nd new release)

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve pulled the SocialMail plugin from the Mozilla site. With some of the changes that have happened with one of the API providers, I decided that the current version was no longer publishable and so removed it. I will republish it once things are back on track.

In the mean time I will be publishing updates hear and hope to have a new Alpha out in a while for you all to play with.

-Daniel

Hi All,

I’ve been a little slack with updates, and for that I’m sorry.  Things have been a bit hectic so I haven’t been able to do as much development as I’d have like and I’m starting to toy with the idea of a new project.

Those things aside, I have some news to share with the SocialMail users.  Due to a change in direction RapLeaf will no longer be providing their Person API as of the end of this year, this means that SocialMail will have no way of doing email to Social Network lookups until a replacement service is found.

I am not sure on what the impacts of this will be to SocialMail overall, the Social Networking component was a large driver of what I’ve been trying to accomplish and loosing it will be a big blow.

My questions to the community are:

1. Does anyone know of any email -> social network lookup services with a (preferably free) API?
2. If SocialMail is to loose the dynamic social network lookup capability, where would you like to see SocialMail go next or is it time to hang up the flag and move on.

-Daniel

It’s been a long time between posts, I guess when you over commit something has to give and for me that meant SocialMail had to take a back seat for a while.

Now that things are settling down again, I’ve had a chance to update the Linkedin module for SocialMail so that it now works with the current SocialMail release, Thunderbird 3.1 and it works on Linux.  Other than that there are no significant changes, just a small tidy up of the preferences panel.

In related news, I’ve switched primary development platforms to Linux so future releases should work out of the box.

So here it is smlinkedin_v0.2

-Daniel

Ahh, had a post ready and firefox crashed, what gives!

This is one of the most significant SocialMail releases to date, rather than new users needing to apply for their own Rapleaf API key, SocialMail now has it’s own key (Thanks to Rapleaf) with a limit of 20,000 queries per month, hopefully this is enough for now!

The great benefit of this is that once SocialMail is installed, users will be able to start seeing the social networks of their contacts, without any further fuss.

If you already have an API key that’s fine, SocialMail will continue to use it for your queries, which will help take the pressure off the shared key.

To make this work properly and protect the new key, I’ve created an API proxy which all SocialMail api queries will go through so that the new API key can be added if necessary.  Unfortunately this means that for the moment, HTTPS queries are disabled until I can afford secure hosting.

So without any further fuss, here it is:SocialMail v0.4.5 I hope you enjoy it and I look forward to your feedback.  If all goes well I’ll post to AMO later in the weekend for wider distribution.

I’m working on a way for SocialMail to work out of the box for new users,  its a bit ugly at the moment with every new user having to get a RapLeaf API key before SocialMail starts working properly.

In order to smooth the process I’m arranging a new single API key with a higher limit and will be releasing a new version of SocialMail which proxies queries through my server.  This is the only way I can protect the new key and stop people taking advantage of it and using the majority of the queries for themselves depriving the rest of the community.

To make sure I have the numbers right, I’d like to collect some statistics from everyone and would appreciate it if you would all post the number of queries  you’ve made in the last month, from the email that rapleaf sends out .

This way I can make sure that, I have a sufficient limit to support the curent user base and some growth and if I need to put my own limits in can do so in a manner as fair as possible.

-Daniel

Development has been slow recently,  with a new job, a trip to London and moving house I haven’t had much time to work on SocialMail.

Hopefully now that things are starting to settle down I can get focussed on taking SocialMail further.  I really would like to get some community input as I don’t want to waste my time developing features that are of no interest to the users.

At the moment my thoughts are (in know particular order):

• More Integrations with social networks, I am seriously considering the OpenSocial based sites as I can cover multiple sites with minimal additional code.
• A user interface rework, scrapping the sidepanel and making socialmail more integrated into the Thunderbird interface.  For example, moving the profile picture into the header bar of the preview pane.
• Changing the API model so that new users don’t need to acquire their own rapleaf api key (discussed below)

The last one is likely to be the most contreversial but I think will have the greatest impact in terms of enabling new users to use SocialMail.  At present I have between 10-20 downloads per day, not to shabby, however this isn’t translating into new users well, as I am only seeing slight growth week on week.  I am of the belief that part of the reason is that users can’t be bothered with getting their own RapLeaf key, which takes a day or two depending on how busy they are.

What I’d like to do is pre-provision SocialMail with the ability to work out of the box, no need to register to get at least a few api calls a day.   At present I am talking to RapLeaf to work out exactly how this can be acheived and hope to come up with a workable solution and hope to come up with something in a few days.

Outside of those ideas, are there any suggestions on what people would like to see from SocialMail, just keep in mind, if it’s a request to integrate with another socialnetwork/site then an existing public API is a must,  I aim to keep clear of private APIs and will not write code for scraping content directly from sites.

-Daniel