ThunderPlunger 2.13

ThunderPlunger is an extension which provides a few new ways to keep Thunderbird clean.

Marking News and RSS Servers Read

Two of the things I like about Thunderbird are the built-in RSS and News clients. While Thunderbird, by default, provides a context menu item for each individual folder within an RSS or News account that marks that folder read, it does not provide one at the account level that recursively marks each folder within the account as read. If you monitor a large number of newsgroups and RSS feeds (as I do), having such a feature would add some convenience. So here it is!

Removing "Phantom" Messages in Newsgroups

I have also noted that Thunderbird's News Client will occasionally show that there are new messages to be read (newsgroup displayed in bold followed by the number of messages in parenthesis) for a group when there are really none available. I call these 'Phantom' Messages. There are already some official bug reports related to this behavior (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71728 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24592) but there is little sign of action being taken to fix this in the near term.

In this bug report (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=294754#c3), a responder describes a work-around to this issue but the technique requires stopping Thunderbird followed by manual editing of newshost.rc files. This is something of a pain. So in keeping with the cleaning theme of this add-on, I have added a feature that will automate this process on user demand. A restart of Thunderbird is required to complete the task but that seems a small price to pay. To access this function, bring up the context menu for any individual newsgroup folder and choose "Remove 'Phantom' Messages". Once you restart Thunderbird, bogus new messages should no longer be shown for that newsgroup folder.

Removing "Orphaned" News Files

Unless you are way too fastidious about such things, you may not have not have noticed that Thunderbird will leave files on disk for newsgroups from which you have unsubscribed. The size of these files may not be large but they serve no purpose. This function will remove these files from your disk. Access this function from the context menu for any news account folder by selecting "Remove 'Orphaned' Files". Once you restart Thunderbird, any such files will be removed for that account.

Clean Accounts

When you remove a POP3 email, RSS, or News account Thunderbird seems to leave many of the account's files lying around on disk. This may be to assist in a future "un-remove" or archival process. But the disk consumed by some accounts can become quite large and sometimes you really just want to permanently and completely remove an account. This function helps keep your computer clean by removing folders that are determined to be "orphaned" from any known current account. Select "Clean Accounts" from the menu available from ThunderPlunger's status bar icon. At the next Thunderbird restart, this add-on will check the following to identify probable "orphaned" folders for removal:

* Thunderbird's default POP3 email storage location
* Thunderbird's default NNTP (News) storage location
* A historical log, established and maintained by this add-on, of past and current accounts

Before a probable "orphaned" folder is removed, you will be prompted to confirm the action. Please carefully consider each prompt before responding as results cannot be undone.

OPTIONS:
This add-on offers a few simple options which control its behavior. These can most easily be manipulated via the built-in add-on options dialog. To easily access this dialog, select "Extensions" from the context menu available from ThunderPlunger's status bar icon. No options require a restart of Thunderbird to take effect.

How to Install in Thunderbird:

1. Right-click the link below and choose "Save Link As..." to download and save the file to your hard disk.
2. In Mozilla Thunderbird, open Add-ons from the Tools menu.
3. Click the Install button, and locate/select the file you downloaded and click "OK".


Product's homepage

Requirements:

· Mozilla Thunderbird

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Fixed a minor change in the Spanish locale which caused the Options window to not display.