New features and bug fixes in current Send Later pre-release

[Jonathan Kamens]

Hey folks,

I wanted to let you know about new features and bug fixes in the current pre-release version of Send Later and ask for your help testing the changes before I let them loose on the world.

• You can now schedule one or more messages directly from the message list. If you select one or more messages on a drafts folder and then right-click or ctrl-click or whatever to bring up the message menu, you'll see "Schedule message(s)" near the bottom of the menu. If you select that menu command, Send Later will pop up a scheduling dialog similar to the one in the compose window, but with the "Send now" and "Put in Outbox" buttons disabled. You can then specify however you want to the selected messages and click the appropriate scheduling button, at which point Send Later will open up all the messages one by one and schedule them as specified. Yes, it actually pops up compose windows to do this, because there's no other effective way to do it in the Thunderbird API, but it's still a lot faster than opening and scheduling them all by hand!
• I believe I've finally fixed nearly all of the issues with mismatches in date formats causing Send Later to be unable to parse the previously scheduled date correctly when a previously scheduled draft is re-edited and you try to schedule it again. For more about this, see the new section I added about it to the user guide.
  
• There are a number of updates to the translations.

You can test this pre-release as follows (and I'd appreciate it if you did!):

1. Go to https://github.com/Extended-Thunder/send-later/releases/tag/v10.0.6.
2. Download send_later.xpi from that page and save it to your local disk. (If you're using Firefox, make sure to right-click on the link and select "Save Link As" rather than just clicking on it, because if you click on it then Firefox will attempt to install it as a Firefox extension.)
3. Open the Add-ons page in Thunderbird.
4. Click the gear icon and select "Install Add-on from File".
5. Browse to the downloaded file.
6. Click through the pop-ups to install it.
7. Delete the downloaded file once it's installed.
8. Report any issues you encounter to send-late...@extended-thunder.org. Even better, email me if the new features are working for you! The more feedback the better on this pre-release.

I want to remind you that you can now support future development and maintenance of Send Later by donating to Extended Thunder Inc., the non-profit charitable organization which supports Send Later. Donations to Extended Thunder are tax-deductible in the United States as permitted by law. You can donate via Liberapay (recurring) or PayPal (one-time).

In addition to the changes above that are only in the pre-release, the current released version of the add-on (and the pre-release as well!) include the following additional changes that have happened since the last time I emailed an update to this group:

• The warnings that are supposed to display when you quit Thunderbird with pending scheduled messages are now more reliable.
• The Send Later button in the main window should not be disabled when sendDrafts is false.
• The warning about quitting with pending messages shouldn't be displayed when sendDrafts is false.
• The user guide link on the preferences page has been fixed.
• The add-on no longer adds duplicate dynamic scheduling function names to the pop-up menus when you edit and save an existing dynamic function.
• The add-on now inserts the explanatory messages about the input fields in the dynamic function editor as placeholders rather than inserting them as actual text which the user has to delete before entering the actual desired field contents.
• Ctrl-Alt-1, -2, and -3 now work properly in the compose window.
• Ctrl-Click and Shift-Click on the Send Later button in the compose window now do what they're supposed to.
• The Send Later key bindings now work properly for users who have remapped the keys on their keyboards.
• I believe, though I'm not 100% certain (please email me if you can confirm it!) that the Enter key on your numeric keypad is now treated the same by Send Later as the enter key on the main keyboard.
• TB102 and TB115 support are now in the same release of the add-on rather than two separate releases.
• If you happen to use a dynamic scheduling function which calls out to external web APIs, Send Later no longer unnecessarily triggers those call-outs a bunch of times when you open the scheduling pop-up.
• Several workarounds have been added to make Send Later deliver messages reliably even when the Thunderbird window is minimized. These workarounds were made necessary by changes to the core Thunderbird application. (Keep in mind that you do still need to have a Thunderbird window, even if it's minimized, for Send Later to work, i.e., if you're on macOS and you close all of your Thunderbird windows then Send Later won't be able to deliver messages even though macOS claims the Thunderbird app is still running.)
• A workaround has been added to make message delivery work reliably with Owl for Exchange. This workaround was made necessary by a problem in Owl add-on.
• The preferences page will no longer allow invalid custom date formats to be saved.
• Also, the user guide has been updated to explain how to set custom date formats.

Thanks for your time!

--
Jonathan Kamens
Maintainer, Send Later Thunderbird add-on
Supported by Extended Thunder Inc.
on addons.thunderbird.net | documentation | recurring donation | one-time donation