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.

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.