Network Lighthouse

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

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.

There has been a lot of talk about an outlook plugin “Xobni“, my wife used it for work and loved it and asked if there was something similar for Thunderbird.   After looking around I found that there wasn’t although there were several threads asking the same question.

With that in mind,  I’ve decided to start a new project, “SocialMail”, with the intention of bringing the functionality of the above mentioned outlook alternative.

Features that work so far:

• Real name discovery (from the local address book, rapleaft, email in that order)
• Social Network discovery and links to profiles where available
• Profile photo from social networks where available
• Email sent/received counts
• Contacts (who has this person been involved in conversations with)
• Previous Conversations
• Exchanged files (that you have received)

Be warned, that this is a pre-alpha release, attempt use at your own peril.

In order to use this you need the following

• Thunderbird 3.0b4 or newer
• Steel 0.1 extension (installation instructions can be found here)
• Manually create an addressbook in your profile with the filename “abook-1.mab”
• a rapleaf api key (get it from www.rapleaf.com)

With out any further delay here is the first release of socialmail for thunderbird: socialMail-0.01
socialMail-0.02 (Thanks to Ananth for noting the version incompatibility)

If you decide to give it a whirl, have any feedback or feature requests please leave a comment below.

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