Tag Archives: kickstart

Undocumented Thunderbird function – help needed

For documenting a research project I want to insert quick links to previous emails. Clicking a link should kickstart Thunderbird and go directly to a known message. Mozilla.org says

Athough Google desktop is able to do it, there is no clear API to instruct Thunderbird to display a given email stored in its mail box (knowing the folder & message ID)

Here is how Google Desktop Search (GDS) links to an email

gsdurl.png

What I have found out so far by comparing different links

(1) is the fixed parameter relating to my hard disk??
(2) is a variable parameter relating to the physical location of my \daten\Mail\thunderbird\imap\INBOX file??
(3) is the unique Message-ID that may be seen in Thunderbird with the View Header plugin
(4) the variable salt/seed value that is stored in the registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Google\\CustomSearch\\Google Desktop Search\\Url which may be retrieved with a 2 line perl script.

So I am ready to construct URLs that link to an email by using GDS. This is, however, not very elegant. Isn’t there any other way (maybe by a Thunderbird extension) to construct and follow links directly to emails? Can somebody trace with Sysinternals Process Explorer what GDS spits out and follow it up at XUL planet ?