The road to becoming an approved Thunderbird plugin is a long and arduous one to be sure, but we are almost there.   The sole reason for this release is to move further along that path.

After submitting for approval, the reviewer came back that the code needs to be encapsulated in a javascript object to avoid conflicts in the global namespacce.   This makes sense, and is something that I was vaguely aware of although at a primitive level, however not something I had any idea about how to do.   The reviewer was thoughtful enough to include a link to an article that explained it all.

So I spent the day rewritting parts of the code and the fixing all the problems I caused in the process and now a new version is out in the wild.

You can get it here.

If you want to help with getting approval I could realy use some more comments, either here or on AMO (the above link).  Let me (and the reviewers) know what you think of the plugin and how it makes your email experience better.

-Daniel

With the release of Thunderbird 3, there have been a few requests that I update rapleaf 4 thunderbird to make it compatible with the new release. As a result, I’ve made a few changes and now rap4tb is thunderbird 3.0 compatible and can be downloaded from:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/6453

A new version of rapleaf 4 thunderbird has been released.   The only major change in this release is that any profile images that are available can be used, rather than just facebook or myspace.   Sites that are known to supply profile images now include bebo, facebook and linkedin.  Any of these five sites can be used as the prefered site, although if the profile image from the preferred site isn’t available any of them will be used.

Basically this means that a lot more or your contacts will now have photos displayed when you view emails from them.

The latest version can be downloaded from here

Almost a year after the very first release of the RAP4TB plugin and here we are with another version (this is actually beta release #7).   For the first time since the very early releases we have a significant new feature.

Now for for contacts that have profile pictures in facebook, myspace or a couple of other social sites, their profile picture now appears in Thunderbird next to the headers!!  By default Facebook is the preferred source (myspace can be set in the preferences), however if there’s not a picture available then an image from another site (if provided) will be used.

Other changes in this release:

• Emails in the format of name+specifier@host.com are rewritten as name@host.com.  As a side note, the + symbol is valid in an email address, the text after the + sign has no effect on email routing.
• When an email arrives from facebookmail.com, we now lookup the reply-to address instead as it is often more interesting.

Here it is: rap4tb-0.86

As always your feedback is welcome.

Have fun,

-Daniel

The latest version of my social networking plugin for Thuderbird has just been released.

Changes for this version:

Internationalization support has been added (translators wanted)

Default cache time increased to 30days

Cache clean up code added, rather than continuously building up, expired entries get cleaned up on launch

Only one feature is planned for the next release (at this stage),   cache flushing for individual entries.  If you have any suggestions please post in the forums or leave a comment.

In order for me to get this published as an ‘official’ Thunderbird plugin I still need more reviews, if you use the plugin and think it’s a good thing, please post to the forum with a short review saying how great you found it.

Update: I probably should upload the new version as well rap4tb-085

-Daniel

After installing rap4tb as per a usual plugin there are an extra couple of steps required for it to work.

Go to http://www.rapleaf.com/developer/api_access

• If you haven’t registered with them do so (its free and you get to control what people see about you through their service)
• Copy your API key and paste it into the Rap4TB options window.
• Click OK

If you don’t do this correctly then the plugin wont work. You will get a message in the status bar saying ‘API KEY NOT VALID’

Stiill having problems why not try the forums.

-Daniel

While I was researching for my article about developing a persons online profile I stumbled upon an online service called RapLeaf. It allows you to enter an email address and reports back with a persons online ‘reputation’. The reputation scoring is interesting, but not what I thought was the killer feature. The best feature of this website is that it tracks membership to numerous social networking sites, be it LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace or anyone of over a dozen different sites.

My immediate thought was this is cool, but I want to know about people in my inbox not going to the web every time I get an email from someone. And hence RapLeaf4Thunderburd was born. It utilises the API provided by RapLeaf to obtain various information about the sender of the currently selected email in a statubar at the bottom of the window, including the various social network sites that they are members of.

Check out the screenshot, the persons name has been obscured to protect their identity. Each of the icons represents a social network site that the sender is a member of and if clicked opens a browser to the relevant website and if known straight to their profile.

Having not done any serious code for a while, and never attempted XUL development before, and only a rough understanding of JavaScript, it was a steep learning curve. But four days after discovering the RapLeaf we have the first release of the plugin.

Instructions

After downloading (see below) and installing have a look at the instructions to finish off the install.

Please note this is definitely still a BETA plugin use at your own risk.

Privacy Note

This plugin sends the email address of people communicating with you to RapLeaf.

Version Update

Version 0.4 This version addresses a couple of privacy concerns, it now supports hashing the senders email address before sending it to rapleaf, this is now th default behavior.  Additionally there is now an option to use https instead of http to ensure the request and response are encrypted.

Version 0.5 This version adds caching of previously retrieved data making the experience a lot smoother.   Length of cache time is configurable in the options window and can be disabled by setting cache time to 0.

Version 0.8 This version tidies up a lot, the preferences have been moved into the plugin options, where it should be and other miscellaneous fixes.  Now ready for release, just need more people to post feedback in the forum.

Get it here: rap4tb.xpi or from Mozilla Addons