Outdated extensions are depressing sometimes
There’s a Thunderbird extension that I use that still hasn’t been updated since Thunderbird 1.5, that I have a hard time living without. It’d be awesome if it got updated to work with Thunderbird 2.
It’s Sync On Arrival. This one makes Thunderbird download all of the new messages in an IMAP folder as soon as it sees notification from the server that new messages have arrived. There’s two main benefits this gives me. 1) Thunderbird feels a lot faster, because 90% of the time when I go to look at a message, it will have already downloaded it and can show me the cached version, instead of my having to wait for it to download the message from the server when I open it. 2) It’s essentially “always offline-ready”. Since the messages are always being downloaded when they come in, I can put the laptop to sleep, wake it up somewhere else where I don’t have a network connection, and already have the messages there to look at, without having to have told Thunderbird that I wanted to switch to offline mode before putting the laptop to sleep. Switching to offline mode then becomes just toggling the state and being done with it instead of having to wait for Thunderbird to download everything before traveling, or even better: having to look at an email at a random time when you weren’t expecting to be offline, and having it already be there instead of being out of luck.
Now the situation isn’t quite as dire as it sounds… the extension still works with Thunderbird 2, it just doesn’t know that it does. But having to use the Nightly Tester Tools to override the maxVersion on it every time there’s a Thunderbird update gets annoying. There’s been plenty of comments in the discussion board for it on the addons site saying it works in 2.0 (and a few that say it doesn’t work, but I haven’t experienced any of the problems they’re reporting). I’ve also emailed the author about it, and never got a response. If I knew more about writing extensions and had time to play with it I’d love to fix it, but unfortunately I don’t. It’d be really awesome if someone did though.
Alternatively, if anyone knows of another extension that does a similar job that also works on Thunderbird 2, let me know in the comments here.
I remember the original ExtendFirefox contest had a category for updates to existing extensions that hadn’t been updated for Firefox 2 yet. Maybe Thunderbird needs to do something like that to encourage people to update their extensions.
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