Any way to link Thunderdird emails in a tiddler?

#1

I tried to find a way to create a link in a tiddler in my wiki that would refer to a specified email in Thunderbird, but I couldn’t find a solution. One attempt was to use the message-id of the email with a mailto:, but apparently mailto: is used to create new emails and not to link to existing ones.

Another solution had me enable javascript.allow.mailnews in Thunderbird, but I don’t have such an option. Anyway according to what I read there may be security risks in allowing this option in Thunderbird.

A solution to save the relevant emails as .eml files and then link to them in my wiki is not really an efficient way to do it although it produces a result.

#2

I haven’t used Thunderbird in some years, but it looks as though this might be of help:

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#3

Thank you. That looks promising. I’ll test it in VirtualBox as soon as I set up VB.

If I may ask, what email program do you use, if you are using Linux? I’m satisfied with Thunderbird, but I’m always interested in trying other software.

#4

I’m switching these days between five different machines. I also switch between Windows, Mac, and Linux (sometimes on the same machines). So I use webmail clients only. I no longer download emails anywhere.

#5

At least twice over the years I lost access to Gmail accounts for unknown reasons. I was lucky that I didn’t lose anything serious especially since I kept my emails locally on my PC. The risk is that sometimes you give a Gmail address or a Yahoo mail etc. address in order to register somewhere. If you lose access to that account then a problem begins. In my experience even a recovery email didn’t work when I needed it.

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#6

It’s a real concern. But downloading emails on every machine always seems to cause problems, too. Most of my emails remain on my cheap hosting provider, and I can get to that through the shell if all else fails.

#7

I’ve been looking into this recently and indeed have a tiddler on it. The general question is whether there’s a way of referring to a particular email regardless of operating system and email client.

There is and even if there weren’t common sense says we can invent one using the Message-ID and do whatever is needed on a particular OS using protocol handlers.

Both Windows and MacOS have ways of registering protocol handlers.

Thunderbird add-ons use URLs starting (cb_)thunderlink:

Some things I’ve read suggest MacOS does it properly using the proper message protocol handler. I don’t have my (old) Mac to hand to check. This is surely the correct way to go.

I believe message URLs are of the form

message:%3Message-ID%3E

I like the idea of using a standard rather than something thunderbird-specific. We also need mail clients able to copy the URL of a message which possibly the MacOS one does.

Jon

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#8

Wouldn’t it be great it we cou get together and develop and importer for single e-mails in the .eml format where we could store them and categorize them in our lovely TWs.

#9

Then there is the issue of attachments.

If your mail client can give you a unique url to a message this kind of thing is trivial, Cloud based email typicaly does this anyway although offen makes use of a message reference in the URL

  • To do this with a local apps depends on the local apps features such as command line, links and message numbers.
  • Once you know the details behind the local mail apps reference to specific emails you can configure it to simplify what you store in TW such as just the message number and then construct the link from it.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQXKNKvMNJCjNkKkxZNzLgLGqSJ

This works in a browser already logged in to the corect mailbox

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#10

Thank you for the suggestion. I’m actually considering trying to use Vivaldi as my browser. I see that it includes an email interface and it may be worth looking at it. The problem for me is that I’m invested in Thunderbird which I’ve been using for many years and moving to a new email client could be laborious and time consuming.

Also I notice that Vivaldi is not listed on the TiddlyWiki website.

Anyway, I’ve only recently managed to have a working Virtual Machine and it’s a good opportunity to start experimenting.

#11

Because we can not reliably support it. It is complex enough to test for Chrome, Edge and FireFox for Windows and Linux. As far as I know Safari is handled by Jeremy since he uses Apple devices.

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#12

You could vote for this community thread. https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/thunderbird-allow-direct-deep-linking-to-emails/idi-p/16022

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#13

It sounds a perfect idea.