suggestion: atom/rss notifications (TB bug 261841)

[elandorr]

My friend made me aware that TB/BB has feed support. Somehow I never used it and still prefer 1 tool = 1 task done right, and I am absolutely anti-notifications, normally. Almost nothing in life needs to be ADHD-now.

But some companies have the annoying habit of announcing time-critical discounts and similar things only via twitter, so I found a way to squeeze that into feed format. (A pain, to say the least.) As TB/BB is running anyway, I might as well try it. But there are no notifications for feeds.

There's nothing at all, no urgent flag for X11. Unless you actively go look at the feeds, you won't know.

That might be something your users would appreciate. Found a corresponding TB ticket from 20 years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=261841

That ticket mentions https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/mailbox-alert/ which might be an option for anyone reading this.

I'd still recommend not using notifications, for the sake of humanity, but, if you have a legit 'need', there you go. This (and most of BB really) is not something I 'need', but you care for the project and I figured this might be of interest to you. No need to bother because of me.

Cheers

[Betterbird]

Interesting. Yet another thing that TB never implemented is coming to us. We'll assess it.

[elandorr]

Oh it wasn't supposed to come off as a demand. I just thought you might be interested to add that to your 'what this guy did in a few years that mozilla hasn't in 20' list. Not that many people still use feeds.

That add-on works, as of today, to future readers.

[Betterbird]

It didn't come off as a demand. And we're not going to rush off doing it. The result of the assessment may be that it's not worth doing. I personally use feeds, but I don't actively follow them. The add-on you mentioned isn't bad, I used it for a while myself. The author is pretty responsive if you find an issue. I'm wondering how it will survive the move to TB/BB 115.

[elandorr]

Is yet another XUL event incoming?

There are indeed a few great add-on authors. They're the reason I keep using TB. Those who never switched from CLI clients and still have their scripts are the real winners, they still work.

All better than 'the new normal' of 24/7 pubsub. Some companies aren't even reachable via e-mail, they want you to 'send a twitter dm'. Even major public stuff like the Swedish freakin' post office.

Another suggestion would be X11 urgent hints. The tray doesn't work for that purpose. The hint just tells the WM to do whatever you set it to, aka 'color that workspace differently' so you check it whenever you feel like. Ideally per-folder so you could filter the important stuff and not be ADHD about every single ad mail. I'm still surprised all of this is not basic stuff since 25 years. I mean, it was already basic then. When did we give up useful functionality for a change in UI design every couple versions? :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgls9IwWUyU

[Betterbird]

Is yet another XUL event incoming?

It's called "Supernova" (check the true meaning at Wikipedia), a complete overhaul of the UI. Any WebExtension experiment add-on interfacing with the UI will need to be checked. Those who add custom columns are hosed for the time being.

Would you like more details? You can also read the respective section on our project page.

[elandorr]

Thank you, I'll have a look.

Would you say there's a realistic security risk in never updating, when you mostly stick with plaintext mails, and trust the server? (If a silly site doesn't provide a plaintext version, sure, you have to switch, but most of the time plaintext works, and you wouldn't switch to html on a shady one.)

I just noticed something rather critical:

What the frick. Why does an e-mail client have JS enabled by default? And why did I never check? :P

See how roomy and breathable that is? See all the white space that helps prevent cognitive overload?

Yeah no. Even the version BB is based on uses more space than my old setup. (try displaying bytes + counts, you'll use half the screen just on the folders, there's padding before the text) Am I supposed to buy a bigger screen every year to fit the same data? As an https://i3wm.org/ user this is ludicrous. At least they let you turn it off.

(Sorry for the offtopic, but making a new issue for a small question seems unwieldy.)

(check the true meaning at Wikipedia),

If you mean that the astronomical meaning is fitting, I concur :D

[Betterbird]

Well, this is all OT and rather counterproductive wrt. the issue filed here. Just to answer it anyway:

1. JS is disabled in mail messages, it is enabled when viewing feed messages as a web page.
2. "See how roomy and breathable that is?" - that's some quote from some TB publication advertising Supernova, I guess. That's for version 115. BB 102 is based on TB 102, and yes, the folder pane columns can take up some space:
   

[Betterbird]

We've recently looked at the notification system again. It would be easy to introduce a pref "show feed notifications" and when set, include RSS into the "normal" notification system. It's explicitly excluded here:
https://searchfox.org/comm-central/rev/6fb5895249a6f1abef7471b55198813abb3b34ff/mailnews/base/src/MailNotificationService.jsm#85,131
If that pref were set, they would be included. Would that work for you? If you have many busy feeds, you'll be inundated with notifications. Maybe easier to use https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-GB/thunderbird/addon/mailbox-alert/ and put an alert on the individual feed folder.

[elandorr]

Thank you very much for checking it out!

The mailbox alert add-on works well.

But the situation changed, anyhow:

I needed realtime notifications mostly due to an annoying company exclusively publishing critical information on twatter. For now, the twats killed every API known to me that was able to reliably transform this crap into RSS. They force an account now, which is an absolute no-go, so it seems there'll be realistically unsolvable trouble for non-commercial API writers. These shenanigans are too damn stupid. Right now, I stopped bothering.