AMO Redesign

New AMO has launched. The site is rearranged and improved usability. You can see sandbox pages, where you could not see in the previous version of AMO without login, even if you do not sign up an account for AMO; of course you have to login to download an addon in a sandbox. Moreover, you can know how many times an addon is downloaded in a week. It is very useful information for searching nice addons.

In addtion to the redesign, the new AMO provides new tools called statistics dashboard for developers. Addon developers could know total and weekly downloads in a developer page. The new tools newly include the number of active users, users' environments, versions of Firefox/Thunderbird etc. The information is very valuable for improving addons. Only developers can access it in default but if they make public it, users can see it too. If you want to see information of my extensions, please add comment to this post. I'll push it public page if many users want to see.

Gmail IMAP Account Setup 1.4.30

Gmail IMAP Account Setup 1.4.30 is available for download now. It newly includes English (British), Slovak, and Indonesian (Indonesia) locales. Please refer to the following for all supported languages: http://hogiblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/call-for-translation.html

This extension is submitted to AMO but it is in a sandbox page yet. It supports many languages and no problems are found so far. So, I want to make it public. In order to do that, your reviews about it are required. So, please add your review to the sandbox page of the extension. If you don't have an account of AMO, please post your review as a comment for this post.

Thanks in advance.

Faceted browsing extension "Seek" and Maximize Message Pane

The SIMILE group at MIT has developed the "Seek" extension which adds faceted browsing features to Thunderbird2. Seek provides UI to filter messages in the thread pane as iTunes does by a genre, an artist name and an album title. A screencast in their site is useful to see its look and feel. I don't think the traditional 3-pane layout is good enough because a preview area is too narrow while I read a message; meanwhile, a preview shares too large space while I search a message. I'm very looking forward to see the evolution of Seek from now on.

If you install Seek, the message pane places at right-bottom of the window. You may think it is too narrow to read a message. The UI is changed to the original one by Ctrl-K but you may think the folder pane and the tread pane are not needed while you read a message. Maximize Message Pane can solve the problem. Download and install Maximize Message Pane 1.0.00b2 then open an extension's option form. You can see the textbox titled "Other:". Input "seekStatusPane,seekPane-deck,seek-mainSplitter" to it (without double-quotations). If you don't need the folder pane while reading a message, check the "Folder pane", too. The Seek's panes are collapsed and the message pane is expanded when you click the Maximize button or press F8 button.

Check and Send 0.8.00b7

Check and Send 0.8.00b7 is available for download now.
This version includes changes of an alert for a recipients' name correction.

I think it is getting stable now. So, changes of functionalities will be freezed soon.
Please tell me if you find problems or have features you want to add.

Final beta of Tag Toolbar 0.7

Tag Toolbar 0.7.00b4 is available for download now.
This will be the last beta of v0.7.

This version includes localization and some bug fixes. Some strings are not translated in some locales yet. These strings have been translated and tested by translators.

I'm plan to release v0.7.10 in the end of March.
If you find some problems, please post them here or contact to me.

Browsing AMO by Internet Explorer

A download page of my extensions links to AMO(addons.mozilla.org) for security issues. All my extensions are downloadable there. However, there is a problem when you access to the site by Internet Explorer. If you browse the page by IE, you will see several popup and cannot download an extension. It seems that developers of AMO did not check the site by IE because the site mainly provides Firefox extensions.

I recommend you to install Firefox. However, if you could not use Firefox by any reasons, please contact me. I'll send you my extensions.

Gmail IMAP Account Setup 1.4.20

Gmail IMAP Account Setup 1.4.20 is released.
You can set up a Gmail Imap account from the "Add Account" button in the Account Setting form, too; Only File->New->Account menu is available in the previous versions.
In addition to the fix, it support Swedish Gmail from now on.

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FAQ about Gmail IMAP Account Setup

I have been asked many questions about Gmail IMAP Account Setup. This post shows frequently asked questions and answers. Please read them before you ask me. The extension set up by following the Google's recommended settins. So, I strongly recommend that you refer to the page, too.

Q1. Why does the extension set the delete model to "Mark it as deleted", instead of "Move it to the Trash folder"?

To mark a message in a folder as deleted means remove the label from the message. On the other hand, to move it to the trash means remove all labels attached to it and move it to the trash. If you set the option to "Move it to the Trash folder", messages will be completely removed even if you only want to remove the copies of the messages. It is very risky setting.

Q2. Why do you recommend not to enable the junk mail control of Thunderbird?

The junk mail control download and analyzes a message to judge the message is a spam or not on IMAP. This will slow down Thunderbird. Moreover, I think there are only a few cases when Thunderbird's spam filter is need to classify a message because Gmail has a smart spam filter. It is not worth lowering the performance of Thunderbird for such cases.

Q3. Why does the extension set not to save a sent message to a sent folder?

A sent message is automatically saved in Gmail and it appears in the Sent and All mail folders when you send it by Gmail's smtp server: smtp.gmail.com or smtp.googlemail.com. So, Thunderbird should not save a sent message.

Q4. Is it possible to synchronize Gmail's labels and Thunderbird's tags?

Gmail's labels are converted to folders and are passed to Thunderbird when Thunderbird accesses to Gmail by IMAP. In order to synchronize labels and tags, Thunderbird should find folders where a message is saved for all messages. Moreover, it should be done periodically because labels may changed on Gmail. I'm not going to make such extension because this will slow down Thunderbird.

Q5. Is it possible to synchronize colors of Gmail's labels and ones of Thunderbird's folders?

By the same reson of Q4, Thunderbird cannot retrieve any color information from IMAP data. It is not possible to synchronize them.

Q6. I already have an account set up by not using the extension. How do I set a star icon to the starred folder?

Please set up by following steps:

1. Install Gmail IMAP Account Setup and restart Thunderbird
2. Right-click on the starred folder and select "Copy Folder Location"; it copies the URI of the folder to a clipboard
   
3. Open Config Editor
4. Create "mail.server.serverXXX.gmailimap_starred" key and paste the copied URI to its value
5. Restart Thunderbird

Please note that you should rewrite the serverXXX by the server key of your account.

Q7. A message said it failed to set up folders. What should I do for it?

Set up the drafts, send, and spam folders by refering to the Google's recommended setting page. For setting up the starred folder, see Q6. For the trash folder, create "mail.server.serverXXX.gmailimap_trash" key and set the folder URI by the same way for a starred folder in Q6. In addition to that, search "mail.server.serverXXX.trash_folder_name" and correct the value by the trash folder name.

This message is shown when a locale for your language is not included in the package. If you are interested in translating the extension, please contact me.

Gmail IMAP Account Setup 1.4

Gmail IMAP Account Seup 1.4 is available for download now.
This version includes the following changes:

• support Google Apps' Gmail
• support Google Mail
• Restart of Thunderbird is required when setup is finished
• avoid to create duplicated trash folders
• support Spanish

Choose "Gmail IMAP (Google Apps) " in the first page in the account setup wizard if you want to setup Google Apps' custom Gmail address.

In order to set a trash icon to a trash folder, the previous versions set the trash option to "move to trash" first, and then change to "mark as deleted". Namely, they fake Thunderbird. However, it sometimes create unnecessary trash folder. To avoid it, v1.4 does not fake Thunderbird and sets the icon by itself. It means the icon is lost if you uninstall or disable the extension. Please note this.

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Check and Send 0.8.00b6

Check and Send 0.8.00b6 is available for download now.
An alert for a recipients' name checking is changed in this version; Only names to be rewritten are popuped. Moreover, sending is aborted when you click the cancel button in the alert.

I'm going to fix functionalities of 0.8 by this version and localize newly added strings in the next beta.

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