I'm currently seeking a new maintainer for the Lookout (fix version) add-on for Thunderbird.

It looks like I won't be supporting Thunderbird for much longer and instead will be stuck supporting Outlook again. This means my development time will be severely limited and with the recent move to drop legacy add-on support I'm afraid I won't be able to keep up.

If you are interested in development let me know either in the comments below, through the email [email protected] or ideally opening a pull request with code changes to the github repository

Unfortunately Microsoft Email servers still to this day send emails out in the proprietary TNEF format (We see this as a plain text email with a winmail.dat attachment). The Lookout (fix version) add-on decodes this attachment so you may open the attached files.

I've just published the V2.0.00 for the Thunderbird plugin Lookout (fix Version). This is an update for the coming versions of Thunderbird that significantly change how addons are implemented.

There are some known visual glitches and the debugging logs currently do not work, however attachments should de-code and save as expected. I would appreciate any testers to give it a shot.

• Github Release Link

Unfortunately Microsoft Email servers still to this day send emails out in the proprietary TNEF format (We see this as a plain text email with a winmail.dat attachment). The Lookout (fix version) add-on decodes this attachment so you may open the attached files.

I've just published the V1.3.00 for the Thunderbird plugin Lookout (fix Version). I have done a fair amount of work on quality of life changes to make it a bit more user friendly.

Have a look at my previous post on how I took up the maintenance of this very useful plugin if you want to know more about the history of the project.

• ATN Page Link
• Github Release Link

New in version 1.3.00

• Attachment drag and drop support
• Optionally remove winmail.dat file when finished processing. This is in options and defaults to true
• Fix attachment pane opening and closing, respects inbuilt Thunderbird preferences
• Ignore blank VCF files to minimize clutter
• Highlight event invitations - To be expanded to full lightning integration

Note: There are future plans to replace the plain text with the attached HTML file (body_part_0.html) that newer exchange servers include in the winmail.dat file.

I have just published the latest release for the Thunderbird plugin Lookout-fix-version.

This is a bug fix issue

Fixes are for the ics parsing

Added quick decompose_rfc822_address sanity check

Occasionally a phrase without any email addresses is used in the attendee fields and this can cause the complex regex in the decompose_rfc822_address function to freeze. As I couldn't come up with a sensible alternative (primarily due to lack of windat samples) I added a simple sanity check prior to the regex.

Added special character skip for ICS attendee data

Occasionally a special non printing character will be decoded, x20 to x7E, causing the ics file to become unreadable. Lookout now ignores these invalid fields.

Added zero( 0 ) UID check

Sometimes the UID will be decoded as 0 rather than null, if this happens lookout will now attempt one of the other UID methods as intended.

You can download this update from the Github Release page or the Thunderbird addon page

In august 2018 I took over maintenance of the Thunderbird addon [Lookout-fix-version][e7c45433]. I soon set up a the Github Organization TB-throwback so that future development can be expanded and transferred easier if I stop work on it.

It's been an interesting experience managing a small project that's over 11 years old. Especially with all the changes and rapid development Thunderbird has been going experiencing now it's separated from Mozilla.

Why did I take over?

I needed to move my office away from Outlook 2010. I had no budget to upgrade the office software, but I couldn't allow the company to keep limping along with a 9 year old product.

Thunderbird to the rescue! Except...

TNEF files, supposedly a thing of the past. Even Microsoft recommends you NOT to send such files. But we have to work with people who don't upgrade and pay the lowest bidder to configure their exchange servers.

Unfortunately the original Lookout was at this point unmaintained and severly out of date similarly Lookout+ and Lookout-fix-version hadn't seen any updates in a long time. luckily Oleksandr was still contactable via the support email and was happy to add me as a developer on the ATN page.

My first change was a simple modification to the preferences css to fix changes in Thunderbird 59. I've since been working on adding debugging, improving performance, squashing bugs and generally attempting to learn how everything is strung together.

I plan on porting the addon to a webextension in the coming months to ensure we have this useful addon for many years to come.