Tips and Tricks from the newsgroups

The following discussions on mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird and mozilla.dev.extensions include useful tips for Thunderbird add-on developers. Please feel free to add links to threads. We will add a categorization system as the link list grows. You can also help by creating how-tos from any of these topics.

Extensions

• Load an extension in its own tab
• Run shell scripts from an extension (for example, to create a symlink)
• Get extension metadata
• Call Java from Thunderbird extensions (also an example here, written for Firefox but compatible with Thunderbird 3.x)
• Define a custom protocol handler to call an external program
• Save Attachment and send it
• Repeat image display using CSS sprites

Messages

• Use ReminderFox to open a message in the default Thunderbird message window (when messageUri, folderUri and gDBView are unknown)
• Determine whether a message has been flagged as junk
• IMAP: Getting message key of copied message by nsIMsgCopyService::CopyFileMessage
• Access the plain text content of the email body
• Get information about attachment without selecting message
• Repeat image display using CSS sprites
• Scan for new messages at startup and manually scan a folder initiated by user
• Force listeners to run consecutively to prevent POP messages from getting garbled during message retrieval