Quick Folders - My Favorite Thunderbird Add-On

Quick Folders - My Favorite Thunderbird Add-On

Dealing with hundreds of e-mails has never been easy. I know people that just delete all e-mails that can't be processed in the first run; there are others that keep loooong history of all e-mail conversations, just in case.
Admittedly, I'm close to the second group. Not only did I develop quite complex folder structure in my Thunderbird, but I also keep some of the very first messages I got here. Just in case.

As long as you remember your folder structure and the message can be clearly filed, you're fine. Once the folder list exceeds the size of the window (and your memory), you're in trouble. And here comes the help: QuickFolders - Thunderbird  Add-On by Alexander Malfait.

Similar to Favorite Folders in Thunderbird 2.x, you can choose folders that you mostly work with. The only difference, well, the most interesting and time saving difference is in user interface. Your bookmarked folders are shown in a toolbar, you can easily drop the mail to the folder there, you can quickly switch to the folder or rearrange the order of bookmarks in the toolbar.

Mamma Mia, it stopped working!

Horrible things happen in the life, even your favorite program can stop working. Little did I know that I'm so addicted, until I lost all my settings.  "Never mind", I said, "I had too many items there anyway". I recreated the list, happy, so happy again. Until I restarted my Thunderbird. No bookmark! How disappointing.

There is always a solution

Looking into advanced settings and <profile>/prefs.js file, I found that the QuickFolder setting is indeed written there, so there must be another problem.
I switched the Error Console on and saw errors when the add ons was calling loadFolderView function. Quick googling gave me a hint, so I commented out the body of ensureNormalFolderView in 
<your_profile>\extensions\quickfolders@curious.be\chrome\content\quickfolders.js
and everything started to work fine:

        ensureNormalFolderView: function() {
/*** Commented out
                  if(loadFolderView != undefined) {
                //default folder view to "All folders", so we can select it
                loadFolderView(0);
            } 
***/
        } ,

Later in the day, I realized that there is much easy way to fix the problem: just upgrade to latest version of Thunderbird (2.0 and higher).
So I can finally get back to my lovely e-mails.

Posted at 12:12AM Jan 30, 2008 by Pavel Suk in Open Source  |