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Roadmap

Roadmap

Below is the development roadmap of Advanced Composer.

Release Policy

Thunderbird versions that will be supported by each Advanced Composer release will be limited to the last two ESR versions.

Supplementary Context Menus

The two supplementary context menus (reply a message by including original attachments and start composing a message to an existing message correspondents) will be moved to a separate addon.

Template Interaction Mode

In addition to context menu, there will be a new GUI mode for inserting a message template, that is a popup menu with search capability.

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Variable Support

Supported variables:

  • Static variables whose names and values are fixed. This type includes properties of a message being composed, e.g., ${Com.To.FirstName} and the original message properties when replying or forwarding a message, e.g, ${Ori.From.Email}.
  • User variables whose names and values are user-definable. By its value format this type will be categorized into plain text and rich text whereas by its value representation into single value and array.

For variables with plain text value it will be possible to format them into rich text, e.g., ${Com.Subject[span][style="font-style: italic"]}. For variables with values in array, it will be possible to concatenate the values, e.g., ${Com.To.FirstName[, ]}.

Variable names will be case insensitive.

Attachment Details

By this feature, it will be possible to create a completely customizable template for attachment details. I also will add an additional detail which can be included in the template: hash sum. Some limitations exist though:

  • This feature only works for cloud attachments because currently Thunderbird API cannot distinguish between cloud and local attachments, but as per info I recently got from John Bieling this issue will be resolved in the future.
  • Behind the scene nothing is special about this feature, it just listens for the default attachment information Thunderbird added to the message. For HTML messages the information about each attachment is easily identifiable from the source of the message being composed, but for plain text it is not. As a consequence, for plain text messages the information that can be presented by this feature is limited, i.e., it can only includes file name, link, and hash sum.

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The aforementioned items will be included in the next version that I expect to be released before March 2024.

To Be Investigated

I also plan to look into the possibility of implementing the following ideas.

  • Since Advanced Composer is developed on top of WebExtension API, it is not possible to execute user scripts just like Quicktext does to create a dynamic value of a user variable. For this purpose my idea is to provide a way for fetching values remotely through a network. Besides plain text and rich text values, I will investigate whether it is possible to set the value to files.
  • It is not uncommon to see some organizations use the same email styling for all their users, be it font style, signature style, templates, etc. It would be great I think if those settings can be synched throughout all their users. What I imagine now is an ability for an administrator to send an email containing those settings to one or more users, so that when those mails are received their local settings will be updated accordingly.

I realize that implementing them will not be easy and will require more time to implement, so even if these are possible I will not likely make them free. Their use as well will be more advanced, meaning general users will need someone with some experience in system administration to make them work correctly.

Edited by Prasetyo S