Access permissions of Add-ons

When you install an add-on to Thunderbird 78, unlike Thunderbird 68, you will see notification of access permission.

In this post, I describe about the reasons of the permissions of my add-ons.

There are two types of notification.

Case1: Ask concrete permissions 

The notification is shown when you install an add-on written in purely MailExtensions/WebExtensions. The add-on does not perform other than it declares here. If it requests more permissions comparing to its functionality, you may carefully check the behavior of the add-on.

Case2: Request full access

This is the case the add-on uses WebExtension Experiments. It allows add-ons to access inside of Thunderbird. It is not controlled by Thunderbird. It means it may perform important operations, such as sending messages, deleting messages etc, without your permission if malicious code is included. So, it says "full and unrestricted access" by assuming the worst case.

The framework is used in many add-ons because the new API, MailExtensions, is very restricted and it is almost impossible to realize the same things performed on Thunderbird 68.

It has security risks, as Thunderbird says, but nothing is changed from Thunderbird 68. The same issue is in Thunderbird 68 too.

My Add-ons

Here I describes reasons of access permission requests of my add-ons. I never see and use your privacy data. Don't worry.

• Check and Send
• See your mail accounts and their folders
  Used to read identity information in order to realize configurations per identity and popup identity information in the check
• Read and modify your address books and contacts
  Used to read address book and its contents to check recipients based on address books. Modification is not performed.
• Read and modify your email messages as you compose and send them
  Used to interrupt sending process to check the outgoing message. It is also used to read and modify recipients, subject and body of the message.
• EnForward
• See your mail accounts and their folders
  Used to read identity information to show candidates used to forward message in option.
• Read and modify your email messages as you compose and send them
  Used to modify subject and To address to prepare the message for Evernote forwarding
• Read your email messages and mark or tag them
  Used to read available tags to show the tag boxes in option
• Access browser tabs
  It is not used. No process requires this permission is included. I'll remove it in the next update.
• Full, unrestricted access (WebExtensions Experiments)
  Used to create temporally file in local to prepare message to be forwarded
• Evernote Tab
• Access browser activity during navigation
  Open Evernote page by Thunderbird tab
• Access browser activity during navigation
  Open Evernote page by Thunderbird tab. It is also used to enable Cookies for the page.
• Maximize Message Pane
• See your mail accounts and their folders
  Used to detect folder selection change. It is used as trigger for restoring message pane.
• Read your email messages and mark or tag them
  Used to detect message display change. Attachment view in message pane appears every time when the display is changed. So, it is used as a trigger for collapsing the view.
• Full, unrestricted access (WebExtensions Experiments)
  Use to hide (collapsed=true) message pane and so on.
• Message Header Toolbar Customize
• Full, unrestricted access (WebExtensions Experiments)
  Used to hide and reorder toolbar button
• New Tab Button
• Access browser tabs
  It is not used. No process requires this permission is included. I'll remove it in the next update.
• Full, unrestricted access (WebExtensions Experiments)
  Used to open message in a tab. MailExtensions has an API to open web page in a tab, but it does not have API for a message.
• Priority Switcher
• See your mail accounts and their folders
  Used to know server type (IMAP or not) of a folder. It used to realize "Rewrite on IMAP server only" option.
• Move, copy, or delete your email messages
  Used to rewrite message source. It copy a message and rewrite it and then remove original message. The remove operation needs this permission. Rewrite is performed by WebExtension Experiments (full access).
• Read your email messages and mark or tag them
  Used to read priority headers such as X-Priority, read whole message source to rewrite, and judge a message is starred or not
• Full, unrestricted access (WebExtensions Experiments)
  Used to create temporally file in local and submit it to Thunderbird's database in order to rewrite X-Priority of message in source level.
• Tag Popup
• Read your email messages and mark or tag them
  Used to read available tags, read assigned tags of a message, add/remove tags to/from messages
• Access browser tabs
  It is not used. No process requires this permission is included. I'll remove it in the next update.
• Full, unrestricted access (WebExtensions Experiments)
  Used to detect click on message header view and customize tag labels shown in the header to toggle tags by the label clicking

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask here.

EnForward 2.0.1 does not work with Thunderbird 68

 This post is for users who use EnForward on Thunderbird 68.x.

 You may receive update notification of EnForward 2.0.1. Please do not apply it and keep using EnForward 0.5.1. If you have already updated, please uninstall v2.0.1 and install v0.5.1 again. 

It is due to my wrong min version marking by mistake. Now I've changed it to 78.0 at the add-ons site.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Emacs keybindings for Adobe Brackets (C-d / C-h)

I've started to use Adobe Brackets for Thunderbird add-ons development.

Brackets is suitable for writing WebExtensions/MailExtensions.

Especially live preview and inline css editing are killer functionalities for me.

This is a reason I chose Brackets even though it is less active rather than Atom and Visual Studio Code.

Another important thing for a editor is emacs keybindings.

And, same as other editors, Brackets has the brackets-emacs extension thanks to Ahmad N. Raja.

It is almost perfect for me except for character deleting: C-d (delete after cursor) and C-h (delete before cursor) are missing!

So, I did a few hacks.

brackets-emacs extension with C-d and C-h

https://hogi.sakura.ne.jp/xpi/brackets-emacs-mod113.zip

Please feel free to use it if you are in the same situation as me :)

NOTE:

Remove the original brackets-emacs extension if you've already installed it.

I'm back

Sorry for the silence for a month. I've relocated and not been able to go online. Now I'm back and reading bug reports while I'm offline.

I've just finished recovering posts wrongly judged as spam in Issue Tracking System. If your post is not added, please post it again.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Little changes in Issue Tracking System

 Issue Tracking System, where bug reports and requests are managed, has received many spams and its spam filter sometimes wrongly rejects your post. It's very troublesome work to find out your post from many spam logs and recover it.

In order to reduce spams in the log, now Issue Tracking System has a "Spam Check" field. By default, "I'm a spammer" is checked. Please uncheck "I'm a spammer" and check "I'm not a spammer". And then submit you post. Otherwise, your post is rejected and not recorded into the filter log; namely, I cannot recover your post.

Thank you for your patience.

Issue Tracking System

I've started Issue Tracking System to maintain bug reports and feature requests. I'll file bugs reported here and by emails to the system. It is OK to post bugs by yourself without reporting me using blog comments or emails. Of course, you can also report by the existing ways.

[Updated 2011/6/20]
Your filing may be rejected by a spam filter. If you see Internal server error after you submit, your post is judged as a spam. I'll watch the filtering log periodically and recover your post. Sorry for the inconvenience.

New Server

Now my web site is moved to new server since the server used before stopped its service suddenly.

The new URL is
http://hogi.sakura.ne.jp/en/

Sorry for the server down and inconvenience.

Recovered again

The sever is recovered and available now. I'm sorry for any trouble this may have caused you.

Server down again

The server is down again. Please wait until it is available.

Recovered

The server is recoverd.

Server down

My homepage is temporarily down. You can download release versions of my extensions at AMO but cannot get test versions including Google Contacts for Thunderbird3. Please wait until it is recovered.

Thank you for your patience.

Anonymous comment is temporarily allowed

Anonymous comments had been forbidden in order to avoid comment spams. Now I allow anonymous comments for test. If the blog receives many spams, it may be forbidden again.

Debugging Google Contacts

Google Contacts still has unfound bugs since it is a complex extension. If you find a problem, check the Error Console message. An error message which includes a word "gmcont" is an error of Google Contacts. Please let me know the messages.

Google Contacts also has a verbose mode. If you cannot find an error message in the Error Console, please try the following:

1. Open Config Editor
2. Create a key "browser.dom.window.dump.enabled" as boolean and set it to true
3. Finish Thunderbird
4. Start Thunderbird with -console option
5. Thunderbird will start with console
6. Reproduce the problem and send me messages in the console (mask your personal infomation such as email address before you send it to me)

Thank you for your contribution.

Anonymous comments are forbidden

As you may know, this blog has received many comment spams these days. I deleted them manually but I cannot continue such tiresome works anymore. So, I forbid to post anonymous comments here. You need to have a google account or OpenID. I don't know whether it blocks spams or not, but it worth trying, I think.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience. If you have a better solution, please let me know.

Getting back to work

I've restarted addons development. While I'd stopped the development I'd received many mails and blog comments. I'll reply them first and then restart the development.

Thanks for your patience.

Stopping add-ons development and support

I've moved into a house and I cannot share times to add-ons development. Moreover, the new house is offline so far. So, it is difficult to update this blog, too.

So, please let me stop the development and support for a while. It is OK to mail me and post a comment to this blog but my reply will late. I'll inform you when I start them at this blog.

Visual XUL Editor

Designing UI is one of bothring part in developing addons for Firefox/Thunderbird or XUL applications. XULPIX is an application which enables you to define UI visually. You can edit UI by looking both DOM tree and preview of the UI. It seems useful when I create an addon from the beginning, especially when I make an option form. See the demo below for details.

BlueGriffon

Glazman, the developer of Nvu, announced a new Mozilla-based WYSIWIG HTML editor called BlueGriffon. A few amount of information is available so far.

Locale update

I've updated a summary for supported languages of each addons.
Google Contacts supports 10 languages now! Thanks, translators!

If you are interested in translating my addons, please join BabelZilla and translate them.
Thanks in advance!

Postbox: Another Mozilla-based Email Client

Scott McGregor, who was a former Thunderbird lead engineer, announced a new mozilla-based email client called Postbox. It enhances managing and searching of messages, attachments, images, etc. I sympathize with the ideas they try to realize. I think an email client should be like a knowledge base which manages information from many messages. Postbox may become a solution for the challenging issue. I hope Thunderbird and Postbox will evolve through friendly competition.

There is not beta which you could download but you can see a few screenshots and a demo. The following is presentation at the TechCrunch 50 conference.


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