Network Lighthouse

SocialMail is an extension to the Thunderbird email client, the companion to the widely used Firefox web browser.   The goal of the SocialMail project is to bring social networking back to email and make the interaction between email & social networking seemless as well as to improve the email experience.

In order to be able to use SocialMail you need the following:

• Thunderbird 3
• The latest SocialMail extension, either
  
  • Stable Release, In Thunderbird. go to the Tools menu and select Add-ons, and search for SocialMail in the Get Addons tab
  • Current Beta Release SocialMailv0.4.5 (right click -> save link as)
• Optionally a Rapleaf API Code (Register here to get one, see note below)

Once you have all of those, installation is fairly straight forward:

1. Install SocialMail as you would any other Thunderbird Addon (Tools->Add-ons->Install..)
2. Restart Thunderbird
3. Go to the SocialMail Options screen (Tools->Add-ons->SocialMail->Options)
4. Check out and change the basic options if you want, the defaults for cache time and conversation limits are ok.
5. Click OK
6. And your done, SocialMail is installed and ready to go

From now on when you view an email, you’ll see information about the sender, including:

• A list of the social networks that they are in (the main ones are covered)
• Their profile photo from a social networking site, if it’s available
• Number of emails you’ve exchanged with them
• People both you and the sender have been involved in conversations with
• Attachments, URLs & Phone numbers that they’ve sent you (in any email you’ve viewed since installing socialMail)

Once that’s all working why not look at expanding SocialMail’s functionality by adding in some SocialMail Addons

RAPLEAF API KEYS

As of SocialMail 0.4.5 Rapleaf API keys are no longer necessary, as we have an agreement which allows a set number of queires per month.  That said, if you have your own key you won’t be affected by any rate limiting that is done to manage the comunity pool.

Once you have registered on Rapleaf’s website, you need to request an API key, you do this by going to the API page and selecting  “Request API access” (or click here).  Sign in, if you haven’t already, and fill in the form, saying that the key will be used with SocialMail.   Issuing keys is a manual process, but in most cases you will receive an email in 24hrs (during business days) telling you that your key has been approved.

RELEASE ANNOUNCEMENTS

New releases will come as I have time to work on them,  if you’d like to stay up to date with my releases and other interesting news follow me on twitter and you’ll be kept up to date.

FEEDBACK

I hope you enjoy using this add-on and that it makes you’re life easier/more interesting in some way.  Please post general feedback below and bug reports and feature requests on the post for the particular version you are using.