Network Lighthouse

Well, it took a bit longer than anticipated (due to a lack of internet access for most of the week), but the next pre-release version of my new Thunderbird plugin “SocialMail” is ready to be tried out.

New in this version:

• Added collection of URL’s and phone numbers, although phone number identification still needs some work.
• Fixed some defects in the caching code so that api calls aren’t wasted
• Corrected an issue that caused profile images not to be shown.

You can get it here: socialMail-0.04
Minor update, it looks like some people are hitting an issue which causes the preferences screen to hang, here is a new release which fixes that problem:socialMail-0.04a

Now that the base of what I’m trying to acheive is done,  I’m going to start moving to a beta release, 0.1, at which point I’ll add SocialMail to addons.mozilla.org for wider distribution.  In the mean time please report any bugs or feature requests as a comment to this post.  Although bugs will take priority for the next few releases, I’ll consider new features as well.

For the 0.0.5 release, the only new feature planned is to add Gravatar support.

It appears that STEEL isn’t going to be all I’d hoped for, for now at least.  The release candidates only include generic non-mail related STEEL functionality which will be added at a later date.

With that in mind, I’ve spent some time on the code and replaced all the steel dependent code so that the plugin isn’t required anymore.

The code to automatically create the address book has also been written, so that no longer has to be done manually.  Unfortunately this means that the current collected data will be lost/needs to be cleared to avoid duplicate entries.   IMPORTANT, if you’ve used a previous version of the plugin, close thunderbird and in your thunderbird profile directory rename/delete the file “socialMailDB.sqlite”.

Keep in mind this is an alpha release,  there is still a good deal of functionality to be added before doing up the documentation as things are still likely to change.

So here it is, Use at your own risk  socialMail-0.03

I’m hoping for a semi-production ready release by Christmas.

Online privacy and the implications of data aggregation is a bit of a passion of mine, that’s part of what inspired me to write the thunderbird plugin.

Here’s an interesting story about one journalists discovery of what he found out about himself.

What the Web knows about you.

People wonder why identity theft happens, so much of our personal data is available online these days that it’s possible to build a fairly complete profile of anyone you want.  Just one of the reasons everyone needs to be careful needs to be careful of what they post on social networking sites.

-Daniel