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 for real usage, at least on Windows XP.

You can download this from AMO, see a detailed description of ToneQuilla here, or see details of changes in this revision from the releases page.

I’ve also now submitted this for official review by the folks at AMO, so hopefully after a month this will be able to leave the experimental sandbox, and things like automatic updates should also work.

Make sure that you make a filter to play “We Are in Love” for the emails that you receive from your significant other!

rkent

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.

• 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, including new features.

ToneQuilla

The published version has a bug that interrupts the playing in some cases. I’ll fix that, but otherwise no changes. Prior to TB3 though I would like to implement support for Ogg Vorbis files in TB core, and add that to ToneQuilla as well. I’ll try to add some more tones at the same time – though possibly in a separate extension so that the main download does not get bloated.

JunQuilla

Changes in the backend to the database interface have made portions of JunQuilla quit working with recent Thunderbird builds. I’ll fix that. Also, I will be able to add the junk detail views shown in my recent post since the required backend code has now landed. There’s also a small error that appears in the console on startup that I hope to find and eliminate.

There will also be a bug fix in beta2 in the backend bayes filter code that could make a big difference in the effectiveness of the filter. Previously, the mozilla-added header that indicated whether a message was read or unread was used as a bayes token. But that makes no sense, since marking as read is a post-receipt action, all incoming messages are unread. So depending on how you trained your messages, there could be an unexpected biasing of unread messages either toward good or junk. In my case, unread messages were biased toward good, tending to lower the junk score by about 7 percentage points – which is a lot.

FiltaQuilla

As with JunQuilla, some functions quit working in recent builds (at least Do Not Notify, possibly others). I’ll need to fix those. I don’t know yet if I will have time to add additional requested features. I see that the Penelope team (Mozilla-based Eudora client) is hoping to add the detach attachments action to the core, so I probably will not do that here. I’ll try to get a preliminary version of the nsIProcess interface up so that you could launch a program with parameters.

TaQuilla

The backend changes that I needed to allow this to work have now landed, so I should be able to release a preliminary version of this soft tagging extension.

Under stock Thunderbird, notification of arriving emails (sometimes called BIFF) may be controlled in two ways – and both of these are system-wide settings. These features are controlled from the General/Options dialog:

“Show an alert” adds a small popup in the system tray when an email is received, while “Play a sound” can play a single system-wide sound.

Now if you have a complex setup, then this is not nearly enough control to be practical. I for example have some high-volume emails lists that I receive, plus for testing purposes I keep both IMAP and POP versions of my main account. I really don’t want to be notified in any way for the email lists, nor for the IMAP account receipts. Also, I like to hear sounds only on special emails, not on everything. So, how do you setup a more practical method of controlling notification?

We have 2 extensions that can help with this, ToneQuilla and FiltaQuilla. FiltaQuilla adds a new filter action, “Do Not Notify” that prevents an alert popup for occurring when a message matching that filter is received. ToneQuilla plays a particular sound as a filter action. So the way to have control of your notifications is to turn on the “Show an Alert” notification in Thunderbird (and suppress it for particular emails with a filter), and turn off the “Play a Sound” notification (and add it back for particular types of emails with a filter).

So, for example, for the email list ICCM, my filter is configured like this:

That is, I turn off notification (which is the little popup) and then move the message to a folder.

When I want to play sounds, I turn on sounds for particular classes of emails using ToneQuilla. For example, I like to know when I receive a bugmail message, so bugmail has the following filter:

My wife particularly likes the “we are in Love” sound bite that plays whenever I get an email from her!

With this combination of features, I think that you will find notification in Thunderbird can be controlled now in a useful manner.

Details about ToneQuilla are available here on the MesQuilla.com website.