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By rkent, on December 2nd, 2009 I’ve been tracking some difficulties in my junk analysis recently, which was caused when I enabled some experimental changes to tokenization. (I added full tokenization of the Received: and x-spam-status: headers). At the same time, I started some experiments where I am automatically training certain incoming emails as good.
What I am seeing is that the common, unchanging words in the Received: header, like “received:from” and “received:(exim”, are persistently occurring with a moderate “good” score, such as 36, even after training junk messages with those headers. There are a lot of these little meaningless tokens per message though, and they [...]
By rkent, on November 28th, 2009 What then do I mean by “extension driven development”? It is the concept of changing the way that Thunderbird is developed and distributed, with a bare minimum set of core code, and the main features presented as a set of extensions, shipped with the product, that can be enabled or disabled by users.
I don’t have any illusions that this has a significant chance of being implemented, and I’m not even sure it’s a good idea myself. But I ask you to suspend disbelief for a minute, and imagine a change to the development culture and process.
An email client [...]
By rkent, on November 20th, 2009 The last few weeks I’ve been adding custom search terms to my FiltaQuilla extension using the new nsIMsgSearchCustomTerm interface, which can then be used in searches, virtual folders, or filters. But I keep coming up with new things that I want to do. That delays my packaging of FiltaQuilla 1.0.0 for non-experimental release. Maybe I should quit adding this stuff to FiltaQuilla (which is already pretty large with all of its filter actions) and define a new search-oriented extension, called probably SearchaQuilla?
So far, I have added the following new search terms:
BCC – locate items in the BCC field
[...]
By rkent, on November 16th, 2009 Today I released a version of JunQuilla that supports SeaMonkey 2.0, and the latest versions of Thunderbird including the upcoming 3.0RC1 and 3.0.0 The new version can be downloaded from the AMO site here. I’ve also submitted this version for review so that it can get out of experimental status.
JunQuilla is my attempt to extend the user interface in the Mozilla mailnews product to provide the information that I believe is needed to properly manage the bayesian junk filter. I suppose that most of these features should really be in the core product, but I found that support for [...]
By rkent, on November 10th, 2009 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 [...]
By rkent, on November 6th, 2009 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 [...]
By rkent, on August 28th, 2009 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 [...]
By rkent, on July 8th, 2009 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 [...]
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 [...]
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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