Comments for Documentation for Mozilla Messaging

Comment on New documentation for the Thunderbird Address Book by docs

docs — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:21:22 +0000

Unfortunately it’s not feasible for us to document 2.0 implementations at this point.

Comment on New documentation for the Thunderbird Address Book by Matt

Matt — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:20:09 +0000

That’s great, now where the hell is the version 2 address book documentation? People might still need it…

Comment on Thunderbird 3.0 docs - MDC structure and stubs by Standard8’s Blog » Blog Archive » Thunderbird 3 Beta 4 Schedule

Standard8’s Blog » Blog Archive » Thunderbird 3 Beta 4 Schedule — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:27:51 +0000

[...] We want to improve our documentation - especially for extension developers (but for ourselves as well), see Jen’s blog for how to help. [...]

Comment on New documentation for the Thunderbird Address Book by bill reith

bill reith — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:34:21 +0000

I’d love this. TBird has burned me more than once with its ’suggest an address’ feature. I’d really like learning if its possible to turn that off.

Comment on Thunderbird development tools? by Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:12:13 +0000

Original post by Dmitri Gromov

Comment on New how-tos by Fallen

Fallen — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:18:43 +0000

Looking good, I’d really appreciate these how-to questions to be answered:

How do I scan and/or alter incoming messages?
or
How do I add “hidden” filters to process incoming mail?

Comment on New documentation for the Thunderbird Address Book by AndrewBoldman

AndrewBoldman — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:28:29 +0000

Hi, good post. I have been wondering about this issue,so thanks for posting.

Comment on New documentation for the Thunderbird Address Book by Standard8’s Blog » Blog Archive » New Address Book Documentation

Standard8’s Blog » Blog Archive » New Address Book Documentation — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:27:55 +0000

[...] of you may have already seen this on Jen’s documentation blog. For the last couple of weeks I have been finding the odd few minutes here and there to write some [...]

Comment on Thunderbird development tools? by docs

docs — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:43:15 +0000

(sent to me (site admin) via email)

The DOM Inspector for Thunderbird 3 [0] is extremely useful when trying to debug overlays or styles.

I’m starting to use Komodo Edit [0] for some editing, although I personally prefer vim (Komodo Edit does have a Vi-emulation mode). It also has a Firefox extension template. It shouldn’t be too difficult to modify that for use with Thunderbird.

Other than that I just have a few shell scripts to package my extension and copy the source/start the version of Thunderbird or Seamonkey specified.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/6622
[1] http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/

Comment on Thunderbird - you can’t get there from here by docs

docs — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:39:28 +0000

(sent to me (site admin) by email)

The most difficult thing to do with respect to Thunderbird’s address book is using mailing lists without breaking them.

If you add a contact without an e-mail address to a mailing list you will probably have to delete the parent directory to get things working again. The specific exception is an NS_ERROR_FAILURE in nsISimpleEnumerator.hasMoreElements. After you see that error you may get all kinds of exceptions when trying to use that directory. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=492695 for more details.

Drag and drop also doesn’t work well with mailing lists and contacts sometimes lose data.

To work around these and other AB/mailing list bugs I’ve had to: create an address book listener (for lastModifiedDate bugs), override abDirTreeObserver.onDrop to workaround DnD bugs, and make sure that contacts have a *unique*, fake e-mail address before adding them to mailing lists.

Number 2 is adding a button to the Address Book toolbar. It shouldn’t be too difficult, but I’m not the greatest at CSS and nearly 100 lines of redundant CSS still didn’t work for some people. I ended up forcing the image through JavaScript:
document.getElementById(”button-id”).style.listStyleImage = “url(’chrome://path/image.png’)”;

Number 3 is adding custom properties to contacts and letting the user modify them in both Thunderbird 2 and 3. In Thunderbird 3 it is pretty easy, so this shouldn’t be an issue.