Any plans to port MailBox Alert to 110, 112 or 115?

[dmcichy]

[fe-hicking]

I'd love that and would also like to donate... like, would 25$ be an incentive? 🥹

[tjeb]

Not sure, to be honest. I have spent a few evenings trying to get it working in 115, but from the looks of it legacy extension support has finally been broken completely, and it essentially requires a full rewrite from scratch using the new APIs (insofar those even support the necessary functionality...), and I simply don't have the time for that.

[fe-hicking]

Totally understand. As a user I'm quite frustrated. I have personal and professional accounts all in one Thunderbird instance and while I need to get specific notifications on the latter, I don't want ones in the former. Can't really understand that TB doesn't provide that out of the box. Your extension accompanied me happily for many years and I'll just stay at the old TB version now.

(You don't happen to know similar solutions to yours that could work with new TB? Or maybe just a "mailbox alert lite" extension that would only allow a custom sound plus on/off per mailbox (not per folder), might that be work I could pay for? 😅)

[curmudgeon13]

I'm on Thunderbird 115.2.2 (64-bit) now, your alert add-on would be so helpful, I can know who emailed me by the sound, it's a must-have item, kind of frazzled without it.

Please do what you can, your efforts are appreciated.

[firehawkx]

I changed the manifest to allow for activation on 115... and while that worked, sadly the extension itself didnt.. most likely for the reasons mentionned above that they dont use the same API structure anymore... very sad... I have 6 email address in my thunderbird, only 2 i want notifications on, and i like to differentiate between them with a different audio...

Hopefully it can be solved at some point. I'd also totally pitch in 50-100$ if that can help.

[garvinhicking]

@firehawkx Actually I did migrate to FiltaQuilla now. This one allows you to setup sounds per-account, too.

[kupietools]

Hah, looks like you committed the cardinal sin of writing too useful a plugin for an app that's historically been fine with completely breaking everything on upgrade. I too relied on this and feel crippled without it in 115, and would certainly kick in a few bucks for an update.

For those looking for an alternative, I haven't tested it yet, but it appears from the reviews that Scriptable Notifications https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/scriptable-notifications/ works on 115. It looks like it requires some coding to use, though, and it's much more complex and not as well documented as it could be (developer expects you to figure out the usable parameters it sends yourself) and at first glance it looks like it doesn't transmit the message URL so there's no way to easily create a notification that can be clicked to directly open the message in TB.

If life calms down I'll take a look at doing a rewrite myself but right now I'm incredibly busy and don't see having the time for at least a few months, if at all.

@tjeb, at the very least, thanks for writing something that so many found so useful for a long time. I'm sorry Mozilla screwed you and us like this. I hope in the long term the changes prove to have benefits, but I haven't seen them yet, and this upgrade has not made me happier with TB at all.

EDIT: I was using this to trigger new email notifications with Terminal-Notifier (also open source, and available here on Github, but for Mac only). I've posted full information plus a bash script to handle calls from the plugin and send them to Terminal-Notifier, including instructions on getting it to work with FiltaQuilla, here: https://github.com/kupietools/terminal-notifier-bridge-for-thunderbird/

[jobisoft]

@tjeb: What are the difficulties you are running into? We did not remove the ability to run Experiments.

You are still using the WindowListener API which I created 3 years ago to allow WebExtension developers to transition from the old chrome.manifest/legacy approach to the new background script / WebExtension approach. I created tutorials for the transition: thunderbird/webext-support#37

And of course, we offer extended support for add-on developers:
https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/community

John

[tjeb]

The main difficulty is that i just don't have the time or the energy to work on it.

I have no doubt the small issues can be worked around or done through an experiment (like lack of URI of mailfolder, or how one can't stop context menu closing on click, or how the mailFilter API is either gone or undocumented), but all of that just takes time. Some of the code harks back to thunderbird 2, which makes it rather amazing that it held out this long (in no small part thanks to your windowListener API, btw!), but I'm not very actively working on porting it to 115, and I'm not sure when I will, and what form it will take; it is unlikely to have feature parity with the current extension.

AIUI, by far most people use it to simply set a different sound per folder, in which case filtaQuilla might suffice (haven't used it myself). If it's just for enabling/disabling notifications per folder, someone created a feature request for that: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1849501, so perhaps that is the way to go for now.

[godzfire]

Can someone please take over this add on if the original author is unable to? This is mandatory for me and my multiple inboxes.

I'm stuck on 102 and refuse to update to 115 because of this.

[kupietools]

@godzfire I don't know if you've read the whole thread (forgive me if you have) but I relied on this too, and I was able to complete replace it with FiltaQuilla, terminal-notifier.app, and a script which I shared above. If you're not on Mac, my solution would require some adaptation to whatever scripting language and notification apps are available on your platform, but should be fairly easy to port (and I don't have any other platforms available, but would be willing to contribute a little thought & research and see if I can provide some tips to help you adapt it.)

It is definitely a drag, it seems like TB regularly breaks backwards compatibility and makes necessary plugins incompatible. Then a ton of users are up a creek until someone has time to learn the new APIs for writing these things.

One thought that crosses my mind, if you can describe how you use it, no promises, but maybe I can try to adapt my existing FiltaQuilla Mailbox Opener script to create plain javascript alerts or something, so an external script and program aren't even necessary.

Can you give me details on what you need to do with MailBox Alerts that a FiltaQuilla-based workaround won't work for?

[curmudgeon13]

Can you give me details on what you need to do with MailBox Alerts that a FiltaQuilla-based workaround won't work for?

I have not looked into FiltaQuilla yet, (just now looked, has everything there, I'm not on a Mac, I use Linux, but I'll look at your script.

How I currently use it:
When a new email is found or saved in a folder with a specific sound file associated to that folder, it is played.

When I hear specific sound files I know who or what the mail is from without looking, allowing me to look now, or later, so I can choose if it may be important enough to stop what I'm doing at the moment.

Now I have to check notifications every so often and see what arrived, I have around 100+ folders by individual, or a group of individuals, reports and various server responses or incidents, mailing lists etc., and associating sounds or various quotes makes management a simple task.

Thank you very much for your direction and script.

P.S.
This looks like a Linux alternative to terminal-notifier.app/
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-send-desktop-notifications-using-notify-send

[alsavage]

A "me too" comment, situation as curmudgeion13 above :( At this stage of my life, I'm much more willing to throw $50 at this than spend a Saturday trying to decipher a recipe that may or may not work for my Ubuntu box.

[godzfire]

@kupietools my usage is essentially what Mailbox Alerts does now: Assigns a certain sound when new mail comes in, and creates a visual alert and preview of the new message, essentially like what Outlook does for new messages.

While Filterquilla seems to have a basic option for a sound alert, there is nothing I can see that does a visual alert, which is half of the reason I need it and can't update.

[garvinhicking]

While Filterquilla seems to have a basic option for a sound alert, there is nothing I can see that does a visual alert, which is half of the reason I need it and can't update.

FiltaQuilla actually allows to spawn any shell command; so on macos you could use intern notification tools, but also with any Windows tool like http://vaskovsky.net/notify-send/ or powershell commands you could create any notification.

The initial setup is way harder than with MailboxAlert, but you can gain a lot of flexibility - and: a working extension for current Thunderbird.

(I wish we could have both options, but I see how much work adaptation would cause)