Network Lighthouse

For those that have followed my development history for a while, you may remember rap4tb my first plugin for Thunderbird which provided some Social Network integration with Thunderbird.   It wasn’t a very glamorous piece however it was functional and had a fair (~100) number of users.

Unfortunately the data provider that was being used for that product (RapLeaf) changed directions and no longer provide the social network information that was being displayed (the same issue that affected SocialMail) and so rap4tb fell by the wayside as it had no further purpose in life.

…

A couple of months ago I was contacted by the people over at FullContact.com asking if I wanted to integrate their  contact  API into SocialMail.   While I think there is a future there it’s not something I wanted to jump at so instead I suggested that I release a seperate plugin which presents their data to users.   And since rap4tb no longer has a functioning purpose, does 90% of what I wanted the new plugin to do, I’ve retrofitted it to use the FullContact API and so “FullContact for Thunderbird”(FC4TB for short) was born.

For those that want to try it out, you can download it from AMO: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/fullcontact-4-thunderbird/

Of course there is a catch, FullContact is a business and their product is the API service for which FC4TB relies on.  They have generously allowed new users to use the service free for a period of time after which it will stop working unless a license is purchased.   The precise method and amount are still being worked out, so stay tuned.

-Daniel

Since moving to a single key for new SocialMail users, it’s become fairly clear that unless I put some controls in place the allocation of queries that I have would be used fairly early in the month meaning no “COMMUNITY” key (i.e. users without their own rapleaf key). In fact my first attempt at rate limiting to 500 queires per day, for the community not each user, mean that the daily allocation was used before 5pm.

Somethings have been changed to improve the situation, I’ve added caching to the server so if the same query is received more than once in a 45 day window the same data is returned (smaller windows are used for requests which don’t return data) to save an API call. Additionally I’ve changed the throttling to 25 queries per hour (again for the COMMUNITY key users) so that the spread is more even throughout the day.

I know this limit is low, but at this stage I don’t have any options but am presently investigating a couple of avenues. If you want more queires then the only option for the moment is to get your own RapLeaf API key and put it in the SocialMail config. When using your own key the throttling doesn’t apply.

Update: Thanks to the folks at Rapleaf, who have given us an increased limit.   So to spread this out I’ve upped the hourly limit to 50 queries, still not a lot but its better than where we were.

-Daniel