I can look at them any time, and there are a few on flickr that other people can look at, but what about people that aren’t tech savvy or are really busy and get caught up in the daily grind?

I was thinking, the answer can be a really simple script running from cron, say, weekly. It picks a random photo from a directory and emails it to a group of people. That’s it. The idea is:

• it’s low tech compared to RSS feeds and social networking sites. This “just works” with the tools people (potentially, low-tech people) are already used to using.
• in a similar vein, commenting and discussion are built in if you feel like it.
• it’s focused on the people on the CC list. Sending out an old photo that is relevant just to those people has a lot more effect than one scrolling by on flickr. It’s got a personal touch.
• it’s automatic. You wake up Monday morning, drag yourself to work, and there is a photo from 15 years ago in your inbox and you can laugh about how bad your hair was. Awesome.

So, I thought I would try it and cooked up audreytoo. Basically, you seed a directory with copies of the pictures you want to send out, add the script to a cron job, and it does it’s thing. There are a couple other features in the script that you could look at if you want to get fancier.

I realize there is some irony in using an automated script to say “I’m thinking of you” but as long as I’m on the CC list it’s still true. Anyway, I’m sharing the code in case anyone else can find value in it.

A few straggling bugs aside[1] proper message sorting has been achieved and the ThreadBubble extension is no longer needed.

The latest version, ThreadBubble 0.8, is compatible with Thunderbird versions up to 3.0a2pre and I expect it will be the last version released. Maybe I’ll work on a Firefox extension next…

Anyway, thanks to everyone who tested, used, and gave feedback about ThreadBubble.

[1] This is kind of a joke – the parent bug is actually a meta bug for all threaded view issues and I don’t know how many of those are confirmed or are relevant to what ThreadBubble fixed. I do know I filed bug 461100 last night which is a new problem with the threaded view as far as I can tell.

• Thunderbird 3 Support: Tested on the latest nightly and working fine. This also means a lot of the code was cleaned up and made simpler. (Thunderbird 2 still works)
• Fixed a bug when sorted ascending where new messages wouldn’t sink to the bottom of the list.

Download ThreadBubble 0.8

Someone already tested this update and had no problems so I’m putting it online. If I don’t hear any complaints by next week I’ll push it live on AMO and everyone can get the update automatically. Thanks!

For those who are unfamiliar, from the site:

What happen is that each time a given mailbox receives an email from an unknown contact (ip), that mail is rejected with a “try again later”-message (This happens at the SMTP layer and is transparent to the end user). This, in the short run, means that all mail gets delayed at least until the sender tries again – but this is where spam loses out! Most spam is not sent out using RFC compliant MTAs; the spamming software will not try again later.

It means a short delay to get a message from someone that has never mailed you before, but subsequent messages are delivered immediately and the amount of spam I get is nearly nothing now – I’m averaging about one per day. Definitely a win if you’re fighting a flood of spam.