Ryan's Journal

While I was writing the other Thunderbird extension, I figured it was time to tackle that other nagging problem I've had with the software for the past two years; that is, having manually marked junk go to a different folder than automatically classified junk. Initially I thought it required some deep rewrite of the underlying C++, but I was happy, in that kludgy way, to find it wasn't so.

So, here's ManualJunkAction, an extension for Thunderbird 2.0RC1 (so far) that allows you to set which folder your manually marked junk goes to. This is mostly for record keeping geeks who want to track how often they have to lift a finger to identify spam after it breaks through all of their defenses.

Some interesting things learned: don't use AddFolderListener on a folder, it will crash Thunderbird; the folder picker widget can only be used twice in one document, the other similar widgets only once each; overlays are great when things are engineered to use them, but not everything is actually engineered to use them; Thunderbird has been tracking whether spam was automatically or manually caught for a long time, very near the surface, but you can't use those message fields in filters.

There are five other things I really want to see change. First, I sort by date from newest to oldest, but Thunderbird's default is the opposite. Second, I want a keypress for archiving messages. I may just throw those two into the RyansWeirdPreferences extension just for me. Third, I want a global or per-account overall folder view so I don't have to check each one to see its settings. The other two I'll talk about some other day.

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