Mail Tweak (for Thunderbird)

[PeterinScotland]

Help! I did a Personalize mailing with a test group of just a few of my own addresses and it worked fine. It asked me whether I wanted to send the 5 messages in my Unsent folder. Then later I sent one of my regular mailings to a group which has 101 people in it. Thunderbird went off screen for a few moments but when I got back to it it had one single message addressed to all 101 in the Unsent folder. I then clicked on File, Send Unsent messages, which produced the result of each person receiving a complete list of the 101 receipients in the "To" section. I'm guessing I should have waited and at some point in the future I would have been pronpted to send?

[PeterinScotland]

Hmmmm.... regarding my earlier message I think I cancelled a script that was busy/not responding. I actually thought it was Firefox that had given me that message. So when trying it again, I'm selecting "Continue" - but not getting anywhere so far!

[PeterinScotland]

After setting the timeout to 600 seconds and clicking Continue after the timeout on the script was up, the computer eventually managed to compose the 131 messages from the second section of my mailing list in 17 minutes (using the whole CPU and up to 70 MB of RAM). The whole process including sending the messages after they were composed will have taken about 23 minutes.

[Rod Whiteley]

Phew! That's why I wrote, in the Restrictions section: "Performance may be poor if you use this feature for large messages or many recipients..."

[earlpiggot]

does Personalise work with Tb 3.0 beta 2?

I've been trying with and without csv /contacts, in the default and different character sets, no luck... Is it me, or it?

[Rod Whiteley]

Blame it, not yourself. I have lots more to do before releasing a version for the Thunderbird 3 betas.

[earlpiggot]

thank you for your generous contributions in any case.

[ginahoy]

First, I'd like to thank you for a great add-on. I especially appreciate Personalize Messages.

I have feature request for your consideration...
One Outlook Express feature I actually miss (never thought I'd say that) is the ability to stop the Receive Mail script. I have six email accounts and I set TB to check all upon startup. When one of the incoming mail servers is down, the script stalls for a long timeout before announcing the failure and proceeding to the next account. With Outlook Express, a dialog box with a CANCEL button is displayed while the Receive Mail script is running. That way I could kill the script as soon as it became obvious a server was down. If desired, I could then poll the remaining accounts manually.

I couldn't find a setting in TB to adjust the timeout by mail server. There's an Internet Connection timeout setting, but I'm not sure if it affects mail server connections. In any case, a Receive Mail Cancel button would be a great tweak, don't you think?

[Paddy Landau]

a Receive Mail Cancel button would be a great tweak, don't you think?

There is a Stop button in Thunderbird.

I too have several accounts. When TB starts, and you want to stop, you need to press the Stop button several times.

If you don't see the Stop button, right-click on the toolbar and select Customise. Then you can add the button.

[Rod Whiteley]

Yes, there's a Stop button but it reportedly doesn't work ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=239616 ). I think going offline by clicking the icon in the status bar or choosing File – Offline – Work Offline stops current connections to servers. Also, I think the intention is that Thunderbird checks accounts concurrently on separate threads, so that waiting for a timeout on one server should not delay the others.

The code that receives mail is not a script, so extensions cannot modify it. I could make the Stop button take Thunderbird offline for a moment, but I do not think that would be very useful.

[ginahoy]

I wasn't aware of the Stop button... I'll give it a try.

The TB Offline toggle doesn't help. If the Check Mail thread is in process, it triggers the "This folder is being processed" warning message. I don't think a separate Tweak to go Offline would work because TB would continue to try until the timeout, at which time it would present multiple Warning messages.

If TB indeed checks multiple accounts using concurrent threads, I can see how this would makes it difficult to implement a useful Stop button. With OE, the dialog box with the Stop button showed which account was being processed at the moment. As soon as you halted one account, the next one would automatically process. Maybe that's why it takes less time for TB to check my accounts If I had to trade off speed vs. ability to Stop a specific account, I'll take speed every time.

[Paddy Landau]

If TB indeed checks multiple accounts using concurrent threads...

My TB processes them in sequence, not concurrently. I don't know if a Windows machine would do it differently. Thus, for me, I have to press the Stop button several times.

Of course, it's quicker just to pull the Ethernet cable out

[johnlvs2run]

Rod Whiteley

Thank you very much for this Mail Tweaks extension!

I just downloaded it, because of mistakenly sending an email to a local club, and viola there were all of their email addresses showing. I normally hate it when someone sends a group email with my address in the header, so this was very annoying and embarrasing for me personally. And here I sent one even including my own address in the header! Thanks to Dan Raisch for pointing me to your extension. Now everything is set to BCC automatically! Woo hoo!

I've also long wondered why mail programs haven't automatically numbered the messages. Yours does! Another woo hoo!

Thanks for your great work and for sharing. Much appreciated.

[PeterinScotland]

I'm using OpenOffice's MailMerge by email now. Doesn't leave huge numbers of messages in my Sent box, and whilst it takes a while (5-10 minutes) it's nothing compared with how long Thunderbird with MailTweak would take to do about 100 messages.

[ginahoy]

I'm using OpenOffice's MailMerge by email now. Doesn't leave huge numbers of messages in my Sent box, and whilst it takes a while (5-10 minutes) it's nothing compared with how long Thunderbird with MailTweak would take to do about 100 messages.

Are you sending an attachment? I sent 50 messages using TB w/MT last night an it only took about a minute.