Thunderbird extensions

Documentation

Getting started with Thunderbird

A brave, young developer wants to develop an add-on for Thunderbird. These links to help through this journey. Note: This documention series is not yet updated for version 60.

• Start by reading the tutorial and learn how to build a Thunderbird extension.  Also see Thunderbird 57-60 add-ons guide for changes introduced in Thunderbird 60.
• Read about the main windows to learn about « thread pane », « preview pane », and « folder pane ».
• Play with a demo add-on that exercises some more advanced Thunderbird-specific features
• Want to do even more? Don't reinvent the wheel: steal from the thunderbird-stdlib project (doc here). Functions for dealing with messages (delete, archive, change tags, etc.) are included. MailUtils.js.
• Haven't found what you need? Read the Thunderbird how-tos; they contain many recipes for things extensions want to do.
• Still stuck?  Ask in a community communication channel on the right.
• Feeling really brave? Read the source using a fancy interface; you can often find tests that demonstrate what you're trying to achieve.

The Gloda database

Thunderbird has a subsystem called Gloda. Gloda stands for « Global Database », and creates Thunderbird-wide relations between objects. Gloda provides concepts such as Conversations, Messages, Identities, Contacts. All these concepts are related : a Conversation contains Messages which are linked to Identities (from field, to field) which are themselves part of a Contact: indeed, a contact has multiple identities.

Typical use cases for Gloda: find all messages whose subject matches [search term], find all messages from [person], find all messages in the same thread as [a given message], find all messages involving [person], etc. etc.

Gloda is extremely powerful and is used heavily by add-ons such as Thunderbird Conversations. Learn more about Gloda:

• an overview of Gloda
• how to create your first message query and read the gloda examples
• Gloda internals: Gloda debugging, Gloda indexing

More Thunderbird-specific links

Some links may be out of date, but they still provide valuable information on the codebase.

• An overview of Thunderbird components
• Developer reference docs:
  • Folder classes
  • DB views (message list)
  • Message summary database
  • MailNews protocols
  • MailNews filters
  • Error reporting tools
  • STEEL library (obsolete as of Thunderbird 52, use https://github.com/protz/thunderbird-stdlib)
  • Developing new account types
• Useful newsgroup discussions (anything that's very old should be regarded suspiciously, because there has been significant API rewrite over the past years making most techniques considerably easier) 
• Thunderbird API docs (mostly a collection of out-of-date pages, relevance is rather dubious) 
• Thunderbird developer release notes - changes in the recent Thunderbird updates affecting add-on developers. Thunderbird 5 for developers has important information on MsgHdrToMimeMessage which is a central piece of code.

General links

• Finding the code for a feature
• Mozillazine articles on Thunderbird
• All pages tagged with Thunderbird
• All pages tagged with MailNews

Community / Communications

Thunderbird specific :

• Thunderbird communication channels is your first stop
• #maildev IRC channel

More general :

• MozillaZine Extension Development forum
• General developer channels

Tools

• DOM Inspector edit the live DOM (Firefox and Thunderbird)
• Workspace for Thunderbird, allows running code snippets in Thunderbird and inspecting variable structure and content
• Venkman, a JavaScript debugger (Firefox, Thunderbird)
• Extension Developer's Extension a suite of development tools
• Chrome List view files in chrome:// (Firefox, Thunderbird)
• Mozmill test tool and framework
• XPCOMViewer an XPCOM inspector (Firefox and Thunderbird)

... more tools ...

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Related Topics

XUL, JavaScript, XPCOM, Themes, Developing Mozilla