This is just a quick update to let all Thunderbird extension
developers know that I've landed a series of improvements to the
MimeMessage API. These improvements will be available in Thunderbird
8. The MimeMessage API allows you to conveniently inspect the
representation of a MIME message: its subparts, the contentType of
each part, the attachments, their sizes, their content types, their
urls, etc. It sounds reasonable that a Thunderbird addon would want
to inspect how a message is structured, and this is precisely what
this API is here for.

If you are a Thunderbird addon developer, and you want to
inspect the structure of a message, MsgHdrToMimeMessage
is what you need. Notable improvements are:
- you can now inspect encrypted messages (but you have to
request that explicitly through the
examineEncryptedParts
option), and there is a new isEncrypted attribute that will
tell whether that part was encrypted or not,
- detached attachments are now supported,
- uuencoded attachments are now supported,
- if the message is stored on a remote IMAP server, you can
use the
partsOnDemand
option to not retrieve the
full message in order to speed things up (the drawback is that
you will get inaccurate attachment sizes, for instance).
I'm happy to provide any guidance as to how to use this API,
should anyone want to develop some super-cool feature for
Thunderbird.
Cheers,
jonathan