Thunderbird, you stupid monolithic app!

Posted on Jan 14th 2005 to , , , perl. Permalink.
Gee Whiz, Thunderbird. If you won't let me modify an incoming message (see previous post), can I at least modify a message on disk? I'd like to use the standard Perl CPAN email modules to modify or at least read your folders.

Can I do that?

Please?

Well, sort of.

I can of course use read-only tools like Mail::MboxParser. And I can even use other tools to modify a message. However, Thunderbird doesn't seem to re-read the mailbox. Shouldn't it react in some way when one of its folders is externally modified?

Drat. I curse all you monolithic, gui-centric applications! Why won't you play nice with other apps? Why don't you expect your user to be a Perl-mad hacker?

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Comments on "Thunderbird, you stupid monolithic app!":

Comment by prestonbridge at blueyonder dot co dot uk

Posted at Feb 26th 2005.

I'm itching to do this too - to remove the 'swarf' from email messages - a friend uses perl to do it with kmail, but I've no idea how to link it to thunderbird (on suse personal linux 9.1).

Please let me know if you get anywhere.

Cheers Chris

Comment by mk

Posted at Mar 3rd 2005.
Hi Chris, As I cited in later posts, the reason Thunderbird doesn't recognize the change to a message is that it is caching the message data. You have to 'Compact' the folder to get Thunderbird to re-build the cache from the real data on the disk. --Matt
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