MailNews:Creating New Account Types

Warning: Some information here is specific to current trunk releases of Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, or, in some cases, rely on patches in the review process on Bugzilla.

This page aims to provide a detailed guide on creating new account types from extensions for Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. This is still a work in progress, heavily dependent on my (jcranmer's) personal tree, where some critical components are merely patches in my tree and on bugzilla (where the latter may not be the most up-to-date).

The Account Manager

The best I can describe the account manager is that it is a hydra of components, managing several slightly different, but distinct, components. Primarily, these are servers, accounts, and identities. Folders, messages, message headers, databases, URLs, message DB views, the folder cache, and even more end up becoming part of this mess of topics to cover, the full scope of which is beyond the scope of this article. Needless to say, I will provide a sufficient overview to allow you to create a new account type.

For a diagram-based view of what is going on, see emre's diagrams on the subject. For other views, I invite you to run make documentation on the mozilla codebase to generate doxygen graphs and pages for the key components. This documentation can also be accessed at db48x's site, although I will warn you that he is using the experimental SVG output for doxygen which is quite obviously not quite production-ready.