MultiTemplateLoader for Thunderbird

Lately I have recovered a small project I started last year, when I was in charge of managing a public email account. I had to deal with a great number of emails, and many of them could be answered in a very similar way. I thought that an extension that would allow me to answer to emails with some standard templates with a few clicks or keystrokes might make my life much easier.

I started looking, but all the extensions I found were too limited: either they did not allow to manage multiple templates, or it was not easy to switch from one template to another, or the format for the templates was too limited (some of my templates needed to attach files to the emails, which I also wanted to have automated) .

Finally, I found ExternalTemplateLoader, which had two of the things I needed most: it supported embedding attachments into the templates, and the usage of multiple templates.

Sadly, it also lacked some desirable features, as using these multiple templates in replies and forwards, or easily switching from one template to another. I had a look at the source code, and I was able to implement these: I added a dropdown menu to the “template” button in the message composing window, which allowes the user to easily configure and switch templates, even in replies and forwards. Also, I added shortcut keys to each of the configurable template slots, so that templates can be switched just with a few keystrokes.

With these changes, the extension did a great job. It was quite useful for me at that time, so that I decided to contact the developer and send him my sourcecode, so that he could include it into his extension.

I never got any response from him, so that, now, I have decided to release a ‘fork’ of his extension. I called it MultiTemplateLoader. After some additional tweaking to fix some bugs and remove some warnings, I uploaded it to the official Mozilla addons repository.

You can find it at the following address:

    https://addons.mozilla.org/es/thunderbird/addon/multitemplateloader/

Also, you can find the source code, documentation, and a sample template at my github account:

    https://github.com/ricrogz/MultiTemplateLoader

You are welcome to try it, improve it and make any comments. All your feedback will be welcome.