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!

The add-on is available, but it’s currently in the sandbox (which means you’ll have to login if you want to see it). If you already have an account, feel free to add a review so I can get started on the process to get onto the public side of AMO.

Once the add-on hits the public side, anyone with an older version will get automatically updated which should help anyone experiencing the “disappearing threads” from version 0.3.

function someListener() { }

someListener.prototype =
{
  OnItemAdded: function(parentItem, item) {
      alert('You got mail!');
  }
}

var mailSession = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/messenger/services/session;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIMsgMailSession);

mailSession.AddFolderListener(new someListener(),Components.interfaces.nsIFolderListener.added);

This code is more verbose than you need (declaring the listener function), and will get you more events than you need (you’ll have to filter the ones you want in your function).

After researching new methods of being notified for ThreadBubble, I came across a better method available in Thunderbird 2.0 – using the nsIMsgFolderNotificationService. If you look at the interface, you can see it distinguishes between an item being added, deleted, moved, etc. which makes it easy to pick out the events you want to watch.

The example above using the new interface looks very similar, but I think it comes out a lot cleaner:

var someListener = {
    itemAdded: function(item) {
      alert('You got mail!');
    }
}

var notificationService = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/messenger/msgnotificationservice;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIMsgFolderNotificationService);

notificationService.addListener(someListener);

This method isn’t affected by the bug I mentioned earlier, and it’s a more direct method of getting notified.

The examples here are sparse on details – you should always be prepared to catch exceptions from code like this (put it in a try/catch block). You can see a complete example in the ThreadBubble source code.

Fixing this problem was more involved than I was hoping, and while debugging, I stumbled across what I’m considering a bug in Thunderbird:

If there is a new message in a thread, and I delete the root message, the OnItemAdded event is fired as if a new message just arrived. If I delete any message other than the root, or if there is no message marked “new” in the thread, the event is not fired. From my limited understanding of the system, it seems like OnItemAdded should only be fired when an item is added (either new mail arrives, or I move a message from another folder). Regardless, I’m no longer using the OnItemAdded hook, so it’s not an issue for ThreadBubble any more.

It’s also worth noting that ThreadBubble now only works with Thunderbird version 2.0 and above due to the way it gets notified about new mail.

Download ThreadBubble 0.5