Tidybird extension for Mozilla Thunderbird - Organize email into folders quickly and easily.

Introduction

Welcome to Tidybird, an extension for Mozilla Thunderbird that helps you maintain a tidy mailbox. You need Tidybird if you:

• receive loads of email,

• cannot automatically organize all of it using mail filters,

• want to maintain a tidy mailbox.

Tidybird provides you with a list of buttons using which you can move email into folders quickly and easily. The list is generated and updated dynamically based on which folders have been used most recently. In that sense, Tidybird resembles the built-in recent folders list which you can use via menus to move email to folders. However, there are some important differences:

• Tidybird is easily accessible as a side panel which you can show and hide as needed. It does not require navigation through menus.

• Tidybird allows you to move email by clicking on buttons instead of selecting menu items. Tidybird's buttons are larger, better separated and easier to target.

• Tidybird provides buttons for 30 recently-used folders. The built-in recent folders list only lists 15 folders.

• Tidybird helps you identify the right button for a folder, which is especially useful if you have many folders with the same name. In particular, Tidybird buttons also display parent folders three levels down from the top as well as the full path to folders as tooltips.

The rationale behind the last point is that a folder is, in most cases, easier to identify if it can be visually associated with a parent folder that is uniquely identifiable itself.

Usage

First, add the Tidybird icon to the mail toolbar (right-click on the toolbar, select "Customize" and drag the Tidybird icon to the desired location on the toolbar).

Click on the Tidybird icon on the mail toolbar to show and hide the Tidybird panel. The Tidybird panel can be resized horizontally and its width persists between sessions.

Click on Tidybird buttons to move the selected message or messages to folders. The button list contains buttons for the 30 most recently-used folders and is updated dynamically as you move email to folders in any way (via menus, drag-and-drop, etc.) and .

To choose the right button, check the parent folder displayed on each button. This can be better illustrated with an example. Consider the following folder hierarchy:

• tidybird@example.com
  • Inbox
    • Personal
      • Movies
      • Music
      • News
    • Work
      • Meetings
      • News
• Local Folders
  • Movies
  • Music
  • News

Given the above hierarchy, Tidybird will display folders and parent folders as follows (parent folders in parentheses):

1. Inbox (tidybird@example.com)
2. Personal (Inbox)
3. Movies (Personal)
4. Music (Personal)
5. News (Personal)
6. Work (Inbox)
7. Meetings (Work)
8. News (Work)
9. Movies (Local Folders)
10. Music (Local Folders)
11. News (Local Folders)

As you can see, in the above example it is quite straightforward to distinguish, for instance, Movies under tidybird@example.com/Inbox/Personal (3) from Movies under Local Folders (9). It is equally straightforward to distinguish between News under tidybird@example.com/Inbox/Personal (5) from News under tidybird@example.com/Inbox/Work (8). This way, Tidybird helps you distinguish between folders with the same name under different accounts, different top level folders, etc.

When this is not enough, a tooltip with the full folder path will do the trick.

Necessary permissions

As Tidybird uses some Experimental API calls, it still needs full access permissions. Once the necessary API methods are implemented in Thunderbird, Tidybird will need these permissions (also added are some permissions needed as implemented now):

• storage: storage API - read and save Tidybird state and settings
• accountsRead (folderManager): messages API - get the folder of a message, react on moved message
• messagesRead (messageManager): messages API - get current message(s), react on moved message
• accountsFolders: accounts API - get name and full path to a folder
• messagesMove: move messages to a folder
• theme: read theme colors to apply to buttons

Supported versions

This table shows the latest version of Tidybird you can run (and where you can find it) for each Thunderbird version.

Thunderbird minimum working	Thunderbird maximum supported	Thunderbird maximum working	Tidybird	branch
31.*	52.*	60.*	1.(1|2)	master (up to commit 2437fb74b8165e74d4f1faa8db10437b01051edc)
60.*	60.*	68.*	1.3.X	tb68
68.*	78.7.0	91.*	2.X	master (up to commit 666e33072d6c02902cf0c533aab052ac29f33773)
78.7.1	78.(>7).*	91.*	3.X	tb78
91.*	tested on 96.0b3	broken on 97.0b1	4.X	master

• maximum supported: bugfixes for up to this version of thunderbird should be done on the corresponding tidybird version
• maximum working: the corresponding tidybird version has working basic functionality up to this version of thunderbird

License

Copyright (C) 2021 George Anastassakis (ganast@ganast.com)

Tidybird is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Contact

Please put comments, suggestions, feature requests, bug reports, etc., on the github issue tracker at https://github.com/ganast/tidybird/issues.