Do MEALS need a fork?

By rkent, on March 23rd, 2009

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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Category: Extensions, Planet Mozilla, Planet MozillaMessaging | 7 comments

Automatically determining interesting RSS feed posts

By rkent, on March 15th, 2009

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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Category: Extensions, Planet Mozilla, Planet MozillaMessaging, TaQuilla | 6 comments

TaQuilla provides automatic “soft” tags for messages

By rkent, on February 26th, 2009

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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Category: Extensions, Planet Mozilla, Planet MozillaMessaging, TaQuilla | Leave a comment
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