Dabbler needs direction - interfacing with thunderbird

[mark bannister]

We use Thunderbird and Firefox as our standard office software in a
WinXP environment. I am trying to integrate thunderbird email into our
project management database. (After writing a parser for mbox email I
see TB2 covers a lot of issues we need.)

We import mbox files into our database (easy enough) and add tags, etc.,
to tie them to our project management. We want to continue to use TB to
send and receive email. What I don't know how to do is initiate a new
email, either new, forward or a reply. Are there built in ways to do
this? If so can someone point me in the right direction?
If not I guess I need a developer to help with this task. Are the
"jobs" groups a decent place to advertise for this?

Thanks all
Mark Bannister

[gNeandr]

Here are two examples using "mailto". They open a newmail-msg in TB (if
it's set as your preferred mail-prog).

Call from Outlook / MS environment:
ShellExecute(0&, "Open", _
"mailto:" + contactStr + "?cc=" + CC + "?bcc=" + BCC + _
"&Subject=" + subject + "&Body=" + body, "", "", 1)
with :
contactStr= "fir...@wed.yy,seco...@asd.cvb
CC = "fir...@web.xx,seco...@gmx.xx"
BCC = "firs...@web.de,seco...@gmx.xx"
subject = "test ..."
body = "any text infos etc"

Windows Api-Function(delphi) to call the standardmailprogram:
Shellexecute(Handle,nil ,PChar(s) ,PChar('mailto:' + first + '?bcc=' +
all),nil , SW_ShowNormal);

This delphi example has been written by someone else, .. i don't know
about that.

NOTE: be sure to use comma as separator between names OR you will have
erroneous settings in TB.

Guenter

Am 07.11.2006 18:01 schrieb »mark bannister«

[mark bannister]

gNeandr wrote:
> Here are two examples using "mailto". They open a newmail-msg in TB (if
> it's set as your preferred mail-prog).
>
> Call from Outlook / MS environment:
> ShellExecute(0&, "Open", _
> "mailto:" + contactStr + "?cc=" + CC + "?bcc=" + BCC + _
> "&Subject=" + subject + "&Body=" + body, "", "", 1)
> with :
> contactStr= "fir...@wed.yy,seco...@asd.cvb
> CC = "fir...@web.xx,seco...@gmx.xx"
> BCC = "firs...@web.de,seco...@gmx.xx"
> subject = "test ..."
> body = "any text infos etc"
>
> Windows Api-Function(delphi) to call the standardmailprogram:
> Shellexecute(Handle,nil ,PChar(s) ,PChar('mailto:' + first + '?bcc=' +
> all),nil , SW_ShowNormal);
>
> This delphi example has been written by someone else, .. i don't know
> about that.
>
> NOTE: be sure to use comma as separator between names OR you will have
> erroneous settings in TB.
>
> Guenter
>
>

<snip>
Thanks. I played with mailto. There seems to be no way to forward or
reply to an existing email though using mailto.

Mark B.

[gNeandr]

Am 07.11.2006 19:30 schrieb »mark bannister«

.
Yes you are right! TB .. as far as I know .. has no other call options
you could use from externally. Think the only way is to do it with a XPI
& access to your "external" data ...
Neandr

[mark bannister]

How hard is it going to be for me to find someone who could write a dll
or something that can do this?

Mark B.

[David Bienvenu]

I can't speak to how hard it will be to find someone to do this, but
technically, the difficult part will be the inter-process communication
between your project management software and Thunderbird. It's fairly
easy to write an extension that, given a message, can do a reply or
forward of that message. (creating a new message is doable now from the
command line) The extension would probably need the message-id and
folder, and from that, it could query the nsIMsgDatabase for that msg
hdr, and then invoke the forward/reply code. But triggering that
extension and getting the data to it would be the tricky part. I don't
know if you can do anything interesting from the command line. We have
some DDE support, but I don't know if there's any way to trigger
extensions from DDE.

Perhaps you could overlay part of the compose window code that's invoked
from the command line to check if it needs to get its data from a
message in your project management database, and do a reply/forward
instead of a new message. I'm thinking of something like
MsgComposeCommands.js's ComposeStartup method. The project management
software could write the info to a little file somewhere, and the
extension could check for that file when ComposeStartup is called, and
hijack the compose window to do the right thing.

- David