Mail Tweak (for Thunderbird)

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Rod Whiteley
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Mail Tweak (for Thunderbird)

Post by Rod Whiteley »

Mail Tweak is an extension for Thunderbird 2 (with partial support for Thunderbird 1.5). It provides an assortment of fixes and enhancements, each of which can be turned on or off independently.

Home page: http://journal.mozdev.org/mailtweak.html

To discuss the extension, please use this thread. To propose new tweaks, it is usually better to start a new topic in the Thunderbird Features forum, because there might be other ways to achieve what you want.
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Tuxman
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Post by Tuxman »

Is there a short (!) list available what it actually can do?
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tanstaafl
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Post by tanstaafl »

Nice extension. I'm just starting to play with it. I like how you modified the status line to count down/increment left as its displaying the startup messages when checking for mail in each account etc.

I'm using version 0.8 with Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 under Ubuntu 7.10. I've also got lightning 0.7, quote colors 0.2.8, and several webmail extensions installed. I'm using the Mostly Crystal 2.0.0.4 theme.

The Account Settings cleanup doesn't seem to work on my system. I can have any number of accounts trees expanded at the same time. The config editor reports extension.mailtweak.accselect is set to true.

I have both a Gmail and a Gmail - Piscataqua account. I used the sample code snippet to make all Gmail account folders green. It did that for both accounts, which surprised me. I had expected it to do a exact string comparison, not a substring search. Easy to deal with, but I thought I would mention it.

The configuration menu flashes the information for about a second on the status line at the bottom. Thats too quickly for me to write down the information. I would normally expect anything that returned information via the status line to keep the information displayed until I did something else that wrote to that line. I tried changing extension.mailtweak.statuslog.display from 1 to 10 but that had no visible effect.

Selecting the Lightning extension and then pressing the preferences button in Extension options/preferences did nothing. It worked for all of the other extensions.

The status icons feature doesn't seem to work with Mostly Crystal. I was initially unable to test it with the default or Noia 2.0 eXtreme theme as "use theme" never worked with it, even after a dozen restarts. Normally 2 or 3 restarts are required at the most. I disabled your extension and restarted - it immediately changed to the Noia 2.0 extreme extension. I then switched to the default theme with no problems. I then enabled your extension, restarted, changed themes back to Mostly Crystal, and restarted. It changed themes as expected. I then tried changing it to Noia 2.0 extreme. I gave up after a half dozen tries. extension.mailtweak.statusicon is set true.
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PatPowerMan
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Post by PatPowerMan »

Thanks for this great extension!

Would it be possible to show the character counter during entering the message (without selecting the text first)?

I ask this, because this would be fantastic for writing SMS (Short Message Service). We have a limit of 160 chars for such small text messages and it would be very helpfull to see the amount of already entered characters.
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Rod Whiteley
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Post by Rod Whiteley »

Tuxman: The extension's home page has a list of the tweaks: http://journal.mozdev.org/mailtweak.html

tanstaafl: Thanks for all this feedback...

In Account Settings, the intention is to expand just the current account initially, not to prevent you from expanding other accounts. I'll reword the description to say: "when you open Account Settings the current account is the only one expanded"

In Folder icons, I think the CSS treats space as a separator, so it's not even a substring search, it's just the characters up to the first space. Punctuation and non-ASCII characters probably go wrong too. I'll investigate how I can improve all this.

In Configuration menu, the menu choice sets the status text and the Status message cache tweak clears it after one second. Click on the status bar to see the cached messages. Increasing the display time works for me on Ubuntu, but the window has to be reloaded to pick up the change. I don't know why launch is not implemented in Linux. Currently, it causes a message in the error console, and I'll suppress this. Maybe I can launch a URL instead...

Lightning's Options/Preferences URL simply opens the main Options/Preferences dialog, without making any attempt to switch to the Lightning page there. If Options/Preferences is already open, nothing happens.

Mostly Crystal uses some internal file names that differ from the default theme's file names. For example, its star icon is named flaggedmail.png instead of the default flag.png. This prevents other extensions from using the icons. I have not tried Noia 2.0 eXtreme yet.

PatPowerMan: I was resisting running code on every keypress, but you've convinced me. ;) I'll probably make that an option in a future version.
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Post by Tuxman »

Alright... too long, that list. I'll have a try. :P

edit:
No localizations yet? ... As this extension seems to have the same functionality as other extensions, what about detecting them, like MrTech's extensions do?
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Rod Whiteley
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Post by Rod Whiteley »

I am happy include to other languages in the build. Do you want to translate it?

There is no general way for an extension to detect what other extensions do. If you find a conflict that cannot be resolved by turning off a particular tweak, let me know.
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alta88
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Post by alta88 »

rod, this is a great collection of tweaks, thanks for including those suggestions. one thing: could permanent pen have a button toggle? f9 conflicts with xsidebar also.
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Rod Whiteley
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Post by Rod Whiteley »

Choose: Tools – Add-ons – Extensions – Mail Tweak – Options – Permanent pen   then go to the Key field and press the key you prefer to use.

Or in the Compose window, toggle it using: Format – Permanent Pen

If you can find an extension that provides customizable toolbar buttons, the code is:<blockquote>MailTweak.PermaPen.activate(state)</blockquote>where state is true or false, or null to toggle.
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Post by Tuxman »

Rod Whiteley wrote:I am happy include to other languages in the build. Do you want to translate it?

How many strings? I don't have too much spare time...

Rod Whiteley wrote:There is no general way for an extension to detect what other extensions do.

... but the most common ones?
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Rod Whiteley
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Post by Rod Whiteley »

There are probably around 300 strings, some of them descriptive paragraphs in the Options dialog.

If you can give me an example of a common conflict, I'll have a look at it.
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PatPowerMan
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Post by PatPowerMan »

Rod Whiteley wrote:PatPowerMan: I was resisting running code on every keypress, but you've convinced me. ;) I'll probably make that an option in a future version.
Great!
In the meantime: How can I help you to translate your extension in German? Is there any kind of translation tool?
(I'm not so familiar with existing Thunderbird-possibilities).
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Post by Tuxman »

300 strings? Hell!
(I'd be German, too... but... holy *****!)

A common conflict is the About:Config extension, for example, which actually only calls the about:config dialog, and "Allow empty subject, which does what it says. (I had only a short look, though.)


Language edited by Steviex, Moderator...
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Rod Whiteley
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Post by Rod Whiteley »

PatPowerMan: To translate, you only need a plain text editor that can handle UTF-8 encoding. The eight (currently, nine soon) source files are at:
http://www.mozdev.org/source/browse/jou ... mailtweak/

To see the contents of each file, click on the number in the Rev. column.

Unfortunately, the files there are not up to date at present. I suggest that you wait a day or two until I fix the tool I use to upload the source, and the files for version 0.9 appear (including the ninth file).

In the .dtd files, translate the strings between double-quote characters. In the .properties file, translate the strings following the equals signs. You do not need to translate word for word, as long as the overall meaning is as near as possible the same. Where appropriate, use terminology that matches the existing Thunderbird translation.

Tuxman: Forum rules discourage that kind of remark, but thanks for letting me know about those conflicts.
Rod
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PatPowerMan
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Post by PatPowerMan »

Where do I send/upload the translated files to? (Don't worry, I haven't started yet - could be a weekend-task) .-)
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