Sunday, January 17, 2010

Extending and Automating Claws Mail - the sneaky way

The recent release of Claws Mail 3.7.4 has also seen a much more powerful version of the Python plugin. It is now possible to write scripts that are executed automatically on startup, shutdown, or opening of a compose window. It's also now possible to write scripts that work on an already opened compose window. The user interface got better as well (e.g. it's now possible to trigger scripts via toolbar buttons).

However, what the latest release still lacks, is documentation and examples. After all, features that are not documented don't exist. This is supposed to get better in the next release. I've started adding a few example scripts to the source distribution that show possible solutions to questions that have been raised on the user's mailing list lately. Most of these should already work with the released version of the plugin, with the exception of the startup script that show's how to add new menu items for custom actions into the main window (the examples being a menu item to mark a thread as read, and to add a menu item to create and show the Python plugin's API documentation on-the-fly - isn't introspection cool?).

Anyways, if anybody scripted something cool with the plugin, please consider sending the (well commented) script to me. I'd be happy to consider it for inclusion in the distributed examples.

1 comment:

  1. Claws Mail 3.7.4 is the most perfect version I've gotten, I recommend of all of you blogers, I hope a lot of people getting it.

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