Thanks to Mozilla’s new philosophy of publishing new major releases every month or so, SocialMail has been a little behind the times for a little while.   However I am pleased to say that there is finally a new version which:

• Is Thunderbird 7 Compatible
• May work with Thunderbird 8, but not tested, I’ve just incremented the version compatibility as it should work
• Fixes some problems with international characters in contact’s names (Thanks to Frank who reported this)
• I can’t test this myself as I have no contacts with European names, so I’d appreciate any feedback

Thats it for the moment, I’ve been flat out with the day job, family stuff and other commitments, I’m just not getting much time for coding.  Hopefully that will change soon…

Get it here: socialmail-0.6.3b

-Daniel

I’ve finally gotten round to testing SocialMail with Thunderbird 6, and everything seems to work fine.

That said, I know a few people have tried making it work and met with mixed success.   So I’m doing the only thing I can think of, publish a fresh copy (which works for me on Linux) and see if it starts working for everyone else.   So could you please download this version: SocialMail0.6.2b (hosted on AMO)

EDIT: If you have trouble with the first link, try this instead: social_mail-0.6.2b (hosted here)

Let me know how it works for you and please post your Thunderbird version and OS so I can work out where the problem is if people are still having issues.

-Daniel

For those that have followed my development history for a while, you may remember rap4tb my first plugin for Thunderbird which provided some Social Network integration with Thunderbird.   It wasn’t a very glamorous piece however it was functional and had a fair (~100) number of users.

Unfortunately the data provider that was being used for that product (RapLeaf) changed directions and no longer provide the social network information that was being displayed (the same issue that affected SocialMail) and so rap4tb fell by the wayside as it had no further purpose in life.

…

A couple of months ago I was contacted by the people over at FullContact.com asking if I wanted to integrate their  contact  API into SocialMail.   While I think there is a future there it’s not something I wanted to jump at so instead I suggested that I release a seperate plugin which presents their data to users.   And since rap4tb no longer has a functioning purpose, does 90% of what I wanted the new plugin to do, I’ve retrofitted it to use the FullContact API and so “FullContact for Thunderbird”(FC4TB for short) was born.

For those that want to try it out, you can download it from AMO: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/fullcontact-4-thunderbird/

Of course there is a catch, FullContact is a business and their product is the API service for which FC4TB relies on.  They have generously allowed new users to use the service free for a period of time after which it will stop working unless a license is purchased.   The precise method and amount are still being worked out, so stay tuned.

-Daniel

After a little digging around I’ve been able to get to the bottom of the conflict between SocialMail and the new Conversations plugin.   It turns out that as Conversation replaces the message view pane in thunderbird, it clobbers a number of events that other plugins may be using.    In my case it was the “MsgMsgDisplayed” event which triggered when a new message was rendered.

Fortunately the authors of Conversations took this into account and provided another hook to enable plugins like SocialMail to interact with it.  Here are the details for anyone that is interested http://blog.xulforum.org/index.php?post/2010/11/27/Thunderbird-Conversations-plugins

With that done, here is a new version of SocialMail, now compatible with Thunderbird Conversations!   SocialMail_0_61

-Daniel

After far too long, I am happy to release a new ‘preview’ version of SocialMail.

This release is considerably reworked from the previous versions, here are a few of the highlights:

• Thunderbird 5 compatibility (not as easy as it sounds), while retaining Thunderbird 3
• A new front tab, showing a timeline of communications from the selected contact.  At the moment this only includes emails at twitter tweets, but there will be more to come.
• A much more functional context menu system
• Attachment lists should be much more complete, gathering information from the internal Gloda database

Please keep in mind that this is a ‘preview’ release (pre-beta),  it hasn’t been tested thoroughly and I accept no responsibility for any problems that it causes

To try out the new version, click on the following link, save it and install into Thuderbird in the usual manner:  SocialMail v0.6

Finally please post your experience, if something doesn’t work as expected let me know, and share your thoughts on the new timeline panel.

-Daniel

Hi All,

Sorry for the long delay with posting an update, life gets a bit busy sometimes.
The SocialMail redevelopment is well underway here’s a summary of what I plan to release in the next few versions (no timeline as yet):
-New front panel showing a timeline of the contacts information (emails, tweets, etc) in chronological order
-Improving the display of all elements to be a bit crisper and more functional
-Context menu improvements
-replacing per network tabs with popup panels, cleaner look and less clutter
-A better way to attach contacts to social networks (this may have to wait until the 2nd new release)

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve pulled the SocialMail plugin from the Mozilla site. With some of the changes that have happened with one of the API providers, I decided that the current version was no longer publishable and so removed it. I will republish it once things are back on track.

In the mean time I will be publishing updates hear and hope to have a new Alpha out in a while for you all to play with.

-Daniel

Just doing my regular rounds of the InfoSec news sites and came across an article on the Symantec website (Puddles, Security Blogs Security Response).

Apparently in last year alone, there were ’286M new malware variants’.   This combined with the continual spate of breaches that are in the news almost weekly (thanks: Sony, Epsilon, RSA and so many others), makes me start to wonder if the current approach to Information Security needs a revamp.

I don’t have the answer to that, I have a few ideas, but none of them are pretty.

Going back to basics, lets assume that all software have security flaws, modern programs are incredibly complicated, so it really shouldn’t be a surprise that there are problems with them.

Secondly, users if given a choice, will choose easy over safe, often at the expense of security.  Fake AntiVirus programs are  a great example of this, exploiting users fears and lack of knowledge in order to take advantage of them.

Where does this leave us, all our tools are flawed, as are the people who use them.  Not a great state of affairs.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the iPhone and Android approach where each application is given its own set of permissions and sandbox is in the right direction.  It’s definitely not the whole solution, malware still exists for those platforms, but its a start and I believe it wont be long tell we see main stream computing adopting this approach.

-Daniel

Hi All,

I’ve been a little slack with updates, and for that I’m sorry.  Things have been a bit hectic so I haven’t been able to do as much development as I’d have like and I’m starting to toy with the idea of a new project.

Those things aside, I have some news to share with the SocialMail users.  Due to a change in direction RapLeaf will no longer be providing their Person API as of the end of this year, this means that SocialMail will have no way of doing email to Social Network lookups until a replacement service is found.

I am not sure on what the impacts of this will be to SocialMail overall, the Social Networking component was a large driver of what I’ve been trying to accomplish and loosing it will be a big blow.

My questions to the community are:

1. Does anyone know of any email -> social network lookup services with a (preferably free) API?
2. If SocialMail is to loose the dynamic social network lookup capability, where would you like to see SocialMail go next or is it time to hang up the flag and move on.

-Daniel

It’s been a long time between posts, I guess when you over commit something has to give and for me that meant SocialMail had to take a back seat for a while.

Now that things are settling down again, I’ve had a chance to update the Linkedin module for SocialMail so that it now works with the current SocialMail release, Thunderbird 3.1 and it works on Linux.  Other than that there are no significant changes, just a small tidy up of the preferences panel.

In related news, I’ve switched primary development platforms to Linux so future releases should work out of the box.

So here it is smlinkedin_v0.2

-Daniel

Since moving to a single key for new SocialMail users, it’s become fairly clear that unless I put some controls in place the allocation of queries that I have would be used fairly early in the month meaning no “COMMUNITY” key (i.e. users without their own rapleaf key). In fact my first attempt at rate limiting to 500 queires per day, for the community not each user, mean that the daily allocation was used before 5pm.

Somethings have been changed to improve the situation, I’ve added caching to the server so if the same query is received more than once in a 45 day window the same data is returned (smaller windows are used for requests which don’t return data) to save an API call. Additionally I’ve changed the throttling to 25 queries per hour (again for the COMMUNITY key users) so that the spread is more even throughout the day.

I know this limit is low, but at this stage I don’t have any options but am presently investigating a couple of avenues. If you want more queires then the only option for the moment is to get your own RapLeaf API key and put it in the SocialMail config. When using your own key the throttling doesn’t apply.

Update: Thanks to the folks at Rapleaf, who have given us an increased limit.   So to spread this out I’ve upped the hourly limit to 50 queries, still not a lot but its better than where we were.

-Daniel