been2long

Last year, for something to do, and to learn a bit about the Mozilla XPI extension architecture, I started writing a Thunderbird add-on.

Going for the region of the Venn diagram where “snappy” and “annoying” intersect, I called it “been2long”. Been2long’s raison d’etre, aside from my edification, was to alert me to contacts I hadn’t (uh…) contacted in a while. That “while” was configurable on a per-contact basis, and it worked OK for me for a bit, under Ubuntu Linux at home, and Windows XP at work.

Then my computer initiated some shenanigans late last year, and I stopped working on been2long when it was maybe (pulling a figure out of the air…) 95% complete.

Between then and now, I kinda lost interest in Thunderbird, and now I just read/write/respond to email within the (Gmail) web client. So now I’m thinking about building something similar for Gmail in Firefox.

That said, if you’re interested in using been2long for Thunderbird (1.5 – 2.0.0.*), then feel free to grab a copy of the XPI here^[1].

Thanks to other extension developers for code that I blatantly lifted from you, particularly Sebastian Apel, author of the very handy Birthday Reminder.

[1] Given that the accepted pronunciation of that file extension (XPI) is “zippy”, clearly Mozilla and I are targeting the same region on the Venn diagram.

Update: Goofed the URL for the (ahem) zippy download. All better now.