GlodaQuilla version 0.3.0 released

This release is intended to update GlodaQuilla to work with Thunderbird version 3.0 (including release candidate RC1). You can download the new version of GlodaQuilla here. (GlodaQuilla’s main function is to provide access to information about the indexing status of each Thunderbird message in the “gloda” global database.)

In addition to the gloda columns, this release adds an experimental feature to allow overriding of the default gloda configuration concerning which messages are indexed. This new inherited folder property is called “Index in Global Database”.  Access to inherited properties such as this are discussed in the post “Inherited Folder Properities (revisited)”

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ToneQuilla 1.0.0 released

I’ve now released ToneQuilla version 1.0.0 on AMO. This allows users in Thunderbird 3.0 and SeaMonkey 2.0 to play a particular sound as a filter action, so that different types of emails can play different sounds.

In this release, I’ve fixed some bugs, plus added support for some new sound formats. If your operating system will launch a .mp3 file in a local player, you can now ask it to do that as part of the filter action. I also support .ogg files using Mozilla’s standard Ogg Vorbis player, though my experience has been that this not reliable enough yet [...]

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Inherited Folder Properties – revisited

In a previous posting, I introduced the concept of inherited folder properties in the Mozilla mailnews products (Thunderbird and SeaMonkey). In the months since, I have incorporated these into my extensions quite significantly, so here I would like to show the UI I am currently using for this, and also discuss some of the issues that I face.

(All references to extensions in this posting refer to the 1.0.0 versions, which as of this writing have not been posted to AMO yet. But they should be available in a few weeks.)

Implemented UI

Briefly, inherited properties are a property that [...]

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Managing spam with “after classification” filters

Nightly builds after 2009-08-19 of Thunderbird (or upcoming 3.0 beta 4) and SeaMonkey  (or upcoming 2.0 beta 2) include a new ability to apply message filters after the internal spam filter has classified the message. Previously, filtering was always done before spam classification, which meant that you could not use any results of the spam classification in a filter.

The default spam processing that is available without using filters (whitelisting, move or delete messages with a sufficiently high threshold) should be sufficient for most users. But for people with special requirements you can now implement those requirements in a filter [...]

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Extension status for Thunderbird 3.0 beta 3 (and Seamonkey 2.0 beta 1)

I’ve just bumped the allowable Thunderbird (and where applicable Seamonkey) version on my extensions to allow them to work with the new version numbers in the nightlies and release candidates. I had hoped to have new releases available by now, but have not yet done that.

Major changes are planned for FiltaQuilla (new custom searches) and ToneQuilla (switching to ogg Vorbis as the standard format). JunQuilla should have bug fixes, TaQuilla and GlodaQuilla will be virtually unchanged.

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Filtering changes for Thunderbird 3.0 beta 3

It’s been a long time since I posted a blog, being busy with things I wanted to get into Thunderbird 3.0 beta 3 (and Seamonkey 2.0 beta 1). Now that we enter the dark days of the freeze prior to the release, I have some time to update extensions to use new features available in beta 3. But I’d like to give details first of changes in the backend areas where I am working, starting with email filtering in this post.

So here are things that are new in Thunderbird 3.0 beta 3 (Seamonkey 2.0 beta 1) that involve message [...]

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Do MEALS need a fork?

While doing various kinds of marketing research around Mozilla development, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend, which is probably well-known to most of you: Mozillians Earning A Living Somehow (MEALS) often seem to resort to code forks. In the mailnews area, we have Spicebird and Postbox. I’m less familiar with the browser area, but Flock is a similar example. This post from lilmatt describes some of the issues for Flock, also discussed by Daniel Glazman. I was particularly intrigued by lilmatt’s comment:

“If, as an example, Flock were to be implemented as an extension and attempted to [...]

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Automatically determining interesting RSS feed posts

One of the interesting applications of automatic categorization of message items is the categorization of feed postings. Feed aggregations like Planet Mozilla often have many more posts than is convenient for most people to keep up with. How do you decide what to read, and what to skip?

The bayesian classifier that is part of the Thunderbird and Seamonkey distributions has been generalized by me over the last few months to allow it to be used for such categorizations, rather than be limited to spam recognition as originally implemented.  I can demonstrate its use with my TaQuilla extension, which allows [...]

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TaQuilla provides automatic “soft” tags for messages

Today I posted TaQuilla on the experimental area of AMO here. TaQuilla extends the tagging features of Mozilla mailnews products (Thunderbird and Seamonkey) so that tags are applied automatically using the same bayesian filter technology used for junk mail processing. TaQuilla requires Thunderbird 3.0 beta 2, which was released today.

Bayesian filters need training, and this is provided in the background for you as you tag or untag messages. Once you “prime the pump” by tagging some messages, and untagging a few others, then it just works. There are also some diagnostic displays available, that show the message tokens that [...]

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Updated ToneQuilla, FiltaQuilla, and JunQuilla posted

Recently I posted new versions of ToneQuilla, FiltaQuilla, and JunQuilla to mozilla’s addons site that support Thunderbird 3 beta 2, and Seamonkey 2 alpha 3 (SM is not supported in JunQuilla). In addition to version support, extensions have these changes:

ToneQuilla mostly gets an important bug fix to stop playing from ending prematurely. JunQuilla gets the new Junk Detail Analysis view that was mentioned in a previous post. FiltaQuilla gets three new filter actions: Run a Process with parameters, Train as Good, and Train as Junk.

The description page for each of the extensions has updated descriptions of the extensions, [...]

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