Step-by-step explanation on how to build an extension for Thunderbird.
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Getting started with Thunderbird
A brave, young developer wants to develop an addon for Thunderbird. Here's a few links to help them through this journey.
The Gloda database
Thunderbird has a subsystem called Gloda. Gloda stands for « Global Database », and creates Thunderbird-wide relations between objects. Gloda provides concepts such as Conversations, Messages, Identities, Contacts. All these concepts are related together: a Conversation contains Messages which are linked to Identities (from field, to field) which are themselves part of a Contact: indeed, a contact has multiple identities.
Typical use cases for Gloda: find all messages whose subject matches [search term], find all messages from [person], find all messages in the same thread as [a given message], find all messages involving [person], etc. etc.
Gloda is extremely powerful and is used heavily by addons such as Thunderbird Conversations. Learn more about Gloda:
More Thunderbird-specific links
Some of these links may be wildly out of date, but they still provide valuable information on the codebase.
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