Using Gmail with Thunderbird

Thought this was kind of cool--using your gmail account with Thunderbird.

RSS Feeds in Thunderbird

Mike McKay is writing an extension that will handle a feed and add it to the "rss feed list if it doesn't already exist."

I'm not much help because I know nothing about how thunderbird does rss feeds; does anyone know of any rss components or any extensions that would be similar enough to pick apart and examine?

DOM Inspector for 1.5??

The DOM Inspector was great and I actually got it to work with Thunderbird. Unfortunately, it doesn't work anymore with 1.5. I tried just changing the maxVersion in the rdf file, but that didn't seem to work.

Is anyone working on this?? I was thinking I'd try and get it to work, but I don't even know where to begin.

2-28-06: uh...I posted a comment with a DOM Inspector for Thunderbird, but the link didn't come out right. Haven't tried it yet, but I'm going to; you should check it out, too!

Using Reloadchromezilla with Firefox/Thunderbird 1.5

With whatever 1.5, you won't need to edit chrome.rdf! All you need to do is install Reloadchromezilla, install your extension, and reload the chrome as often as you would like! You will have to make one simple edit to a "chrome.manifest" file, as explained later.

As noted in this mozillazine entry, you could just restart firefox/thunderbird and see the changes you made in your extension. Reloadchromezilla is useful because instead of restarting, you can just click the button. This works because "reloading the chrome" will cause mozilla to update the changes you made to your extension. For more information on how Reloadchromezila works, see this previous post.

Read this mozillazine entry for how to package and install your extension, but the installation method below worked for me:

1. package your extension into an
.xpi, and drag into the extensions folder in your profile directory. This is usually located in C:\documents and settings\(your user name)\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox or Application Data\Thunderbird

2. restart Firefox/thunderbird. On the restart, your extension will install.

3. once installed, to edit your files, extract your .jar file. This will reveal your .js and .xul files

4. To get the program to use these files instead of the .jar, you'll have to edit your chrome.manifest file. All you have to do is replace jar:chrome/(your extension).jar!/ with chrome/

you're replacing the jar stuff with "chrome" because the files will be in the chrome folder.

5. start developing! Use the Reloadchromezilla button or highly customizable context menu!

Mozilla Thunderbird: Creating Folders

I don't remember if this was a previous post or not, but...

just get to your folder (see Navigating Folders)

this will be an nsIMsgFolder.

Use nsIMsgFolder.createSubfolder(folder_name,msgWindow);
As may be inferred, this will create the subfolder, but you have to update the parent folder to get it to show up in the Folder Pane.

parentFolder.updateFolder(msgWindow);

If you want to learn more about nsIMsgFolder, go to the XulPlanet article.

Updating Extensions to 1.5; Changes and Problems

While frantically trying to understand how I'm going to make my extension compatibile with thunderbird 1.5 beta, I came across this.
The most important change that I see is the chrome.manifest file, which...replaces contents.rdf?

Anyway, it was useful to me to restructure my files as it's shown in the mozillazine article--you'll need to change the references to your .dtd files and .css files because the locations will be different. This may sound redundant or insane, but be sure those locations are correct! I had a lot of problems because I put chrome://thunderbirdtemplates/locale/en-US/overlay.dtd in the .xul instead of chrome://thunderbirdtemplates/locale/overlay.dtd

Good luck updating!

Updating Extensions for 1.5..."New" Extension Manager??

Well, I've been having a lot of problems getting my extension to work with Thunderbird 1.5--this probably applies to the beta of Firefox, as well.

Although this won't cause errors when you try to install, your .xpi file is going to need these changes:

1) chrome.manifest file. This replaces contents.rdf--you don't need contents.rdf files in subfolders now, either. A good place to go is the Mozillazine article. Look at the file hierarchy for how to set up your .xpi.

Ok, not that bad. But what the heck is the "New Extension Manager"?? The Mozillazine article made this really confusing for me.

So go here.

File I/O in Mozilla

For anyone interested in how File i/o works for Mozilla, check out the linked mozillazine article

Populating the Messagepane in Thunderbird??

You know, the message preview pane--how does that get populated with the body of whatever selected message?? How do you get the body of a message in general? Setting up a stream and then reading the body out of the stream won't work for IMAP messages, because you have to download them first. How would one go about accomplishing that?