Send Later 3 Thunderbird Add-on

Table of contents

(Clicking on section headers in the text will return you to the table of contents.)

Introduction

The Send Later 3 Thunderbird add-on, which supports versions 2.0 and newer of Thunderbird and versions 2 and 3 of Postbox, allows you you to write an email message and then tell Thunderbird when you want it to be sent. The message is then saved back into your Drafts folder, and delivered at approximately the specified time.

The add-on is available for download from addons.mozilla.org. Release notes for each new release of Send Later 3 are published there and below. What follows is a user manual for the add-on. Everything below (except for the installation section) assumes that you’ve already installed the add-on from addons.mozilla.org and restarted Thunderbird or Postbox.

If you have any comments, questions or feedback about the add-on, please feel free to email me.

Credits

A number of people deserve credit for helping to make this add-on what it is today.

A huge thank you to Karthik Sivaram, the author and maintainer of the add-on prior to Thunderbird 3! I would never have been able to create and maintain the current version if not for its predecessor that he wrote.

Thanks, also, to the people who have translated the add-on into non-English languages (at present, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and Simplified Chinese). These translations were created by Suzanne Iseli and Daniel S. (German), Milcom.es (Spanish), Samtron-Translations (Finnish), Didier Journois and Bigpapa (French), Cesare (Italian), Ryo Matsui (Japanese), an anonymous translator (Dutch), Maciej Kobuszewski (Polish), Mikael Hiort af Ornäs (Swedish) and “yfdyh000″ at BabelZilla (Simplified Chinese). Please see below if you would like to help add another translation. It’s not hard!

Supporters

I am grateful to the hundreds of people who have made monetary contributions to support the ongoing development of Send Later 3. Too many have contributed to be able to list you all here, but special recognition is due to those who have contributed significantly more than the suggested donation.

Gold supporters (>$50)

  • — Converting more visitors into leads by knowing who visits your website

Silver supporters (>$25)

  • Anonymous (× 6)

Bronze supporters (>$10)

There’s room on this list for you too! :-)

Installation

Method 1

  1. In Thunderbird, open the add-ons dialog with the Tools > Add-ons menu command.
  2. Click the “Get Add-ons” button.
  3. Enter “send later 3″ in the search box and hit Enter.
  4. When the “Send Later 3″ add-on shows up in the search results, click the “Add to Thunderbird…” or “Install” button.
  5. When the “Software installation” dialog pops up, click the “Install Now” button when it becomes active.
  6. Restart Thunderbird after the installation.

Method 2 (use only if Method 1 doesn’t work)

  1. Download the add-on as an “.xpi” file from addons.mozilla.org, saving it to your Desktop or another obvious location.
  2. In Thunderbird, select the “Tools > Add-ons” menu command.
    1. Thunderbird 2 or 3: click the “Install…” button.
    2. Thunderbird 5 and later: click the little sliders icon next to the search box and select “Install Add-on From File…”.
  3. Browse to the downloaded Send Later 3 “.xpi” file and open it.
  4. Make sure your mouse is over the install dialog and it has focus. When the “Install” button becomes active, click on it.
  5. Restart Thunderbird when it tells you to after the add-on is installed.

Basic usage

When you want to schedule a message for later delivery, either select the File > Send Later menu command in the message composition window, or hit Ctrl-Shift-Enter. This will pop up the following dialog:

Here is what you can do from this dialog:

  • Specify a specific time at which to send the message. Set the time using the hour, minute, year, month and day pop-up menus on the first line of the dialog, and then click “Send Later at specified time” (or type Ctrl-Enter).
  • Schedule a recurring message. See below.
  • Send the message using one of the preset buttons. Click “15 mins later”, “30 mins later”, or “2 hours later” to send the message the indicated amount of time into the future.
  • Deposit the message into your Outbox for later delivery by Thunderbird. If you click “Passthrough to Send Later”, the message will be copied immediately into your Outbox. This is the behavior of the standard Thunderbird “Send Later” command before you installed the add-on. The message will then be sent if you execute File > Send Unsent Messages, or if you go into and out of offline mode, or if you exit and restart Thunderbird. In the latter two cases, Thunderbird may or may not prompt for confirmation before sending unsent messages, depending on how you have configured it.
  • Send the message immediately. If you click “Send Now”, the message will be delivered immediately, as if you had executed the “Send” command instead of “Send Later”. Note that you can activate this button by hitting Alt-N or the equivalent on your platform or in your language.
  • Go back to editing the message. Click the “Cancel” button to go back to editing the message.

When you schedule a message for delivery, it is saved in your Drafts folder with the necessary scheduling information embedded in it. If you wish to reschedule a message later, just edit the saved draft and do “Send Later” again and specify the new send time. If you wish to cancel a scheduled message delivery, edit the draft and save it normally without “Send Later” (or just send it immediately, if that’s what you want to do), and the scheduling information will be removed.

Preferences

You can edit the add-on’s preferences by selecting the Tools > Add-ons menu command, clicking the “Extensions” button to view installed extensions, clicking on Send Later 3, and clicking on “Preferences”. Here is the main preferences screen, followed by explanations of the various settings:

  • Check every controls how often the add-on checks for messages whose delivery time has arrived. The default, 60,000 milliseconds, i.e., once per minute, is adequate for most people. In rare cases, you may need to use a lower value (higher frequency) if your drafts are sometimes sent late or not at all.
  • “Send” does “Send Later”, if it is enabled, causes the scheduling dialog to pop up not only when you run the “Send Later” command, but also, when you run “Send”, whether it’s by clicking the “Send” button, selecting File > Send, or typing Ctrl-Enter. It’ll therefore prevent you from accidentally sending a message now that you meant to schedule for later. This feature is not enabled by default. Note, furthermore, that this feature is not available in Thunderbird 2, and therefore on Thunderbird 2, the preference for it is not visible.
  • Bind Alt-Shift-Enter instead of Ctrl-Shift-Enter causes the pop-up Send Later 3 dialog to be bound to the key sequence Alt-Shift-Enter instead of Ctrl-Shift-Enter. When this feature is activated, Ctrl-Shift-Enter remains the original Thunderbird functionality, i.e., depositing the message into the Outbox for sending later.
  • Show Send Later Column controls whether a column showing the scheduled delivery times of messages that have them should be displayed when viewing a Drafts folder.
  • Show Send Later Header controls whether the “x-send-later-at” message header, which is where the add-on stores information about when a draft should be delivered, should be displayed when viewing drafts that have them.
  • Show Send Later in Status Bar controls whether the add-on should show its current status in the Status Bar at the bottom of the Thunderbird window. When Thunderbird first starts up, the current version of the add-on will be shown briefly if this preference is checked. After that, the number of pending scheduled messages, or “IDLE” if there are none, will be displayed. If this preference is unset, then the next one is ignored.
  • Show Background Progress in Status Bar controls whether an animated progress bar should be shown in your Thunderbird status bar when the add-on is working, i.e., when it wakes up periodically to check for messages whose delivery time has arrived. If the previous preference is unset, then this preference is ignored.
  • Show Dropdowns in Toolbar controls whether to show the hour, minute, year, month and day drop-downs and the “Send Later” button in the compose window toolbar. If you only want shortcut buttons in the toolbar, uncheck this preference.
  • Trigger unsent message delivery from Outbox controls whether the add-on should actually send messages when their delivery time arrives, or rather should just deposit them into your Outbox and leave them there until the next time you send unsent messages as described above. You might want to disable this setting if you use some other add-on, e.g., BlunderDelay, to manage your message delivery. See the Caveats section below for more information about this.

Following these settings are links you can click on to send me email, view the user guide (i.e., this page), or make a donation to support continued development of the add-on. Some of these links are unavailable in Thunderbird 2.

In addition to these main settings, you can change the behavior of the preset buttons by editing the settings of the “Shortcut” tabs of the preferences dialog:

  • Button label specifies the string that is displayed in the butotn. The default setting, “<from locale>”, tells the add-on to get the label from the translated strings for the current locale. The locale string (e.g., “15 mins later”, “30 mins later”, “2 hours later”) won’t make sense if you change the “Minutes” value for the shortcut, so if you do, you should probably change the label as well.
  • Minutes specifies how many minutes into the future the message should be sent if you click this button. The defaults, obviously, are 15, 30 and 120.
  • Show in toolbar controls whether this button should be included in the compose pane toolbar for this add-on, if you add the toolbar to your composition window. For more on this, see below.

Toolbar

If you would like, you can add a Send Later 3 toolbar to your composition pane to give you direct access to the add-on’s functionality without needing to go through the pop-up. Here is how to do that:

  1. Right-click on the toolbar in a message composition window.
  2. Select “Customize…”.
  3. Find the Send Later 3 toolbar in the “Customize Toolbar” window that pops up.
  4. Drag and drop the Send Later 3 toolbar onto your message composition window toolbar.
  5. Click “Done” to close the “Customize Toolbar” window.

By default, the toolbar will display hour, minute, year, month, and day pop-up menus and a “Send Later” button to schedule the message to be sent at the specified time. If you’d like, you can also add one or more of the preset buttons to the toolbar by enabling the “Show in toolbar” setting for the ones you want in the add-on preferences.

The Send Later 3 toolbar controls are disabled when you are editing a recurring message.

“I want a ‘Send Later’ button!”

If you want there to be a button on your toolbar to pop up the Send Later 3 prompt window, i.e., a button that does the same thing as File > Send Later or Ctrl-Shift-Enter, you can get one by installing the MagicSLR add-on and adding its “Send Later” button to your toolbar.

Caveats and known issues

Some things to keep in mind:

  1. Whenever Send Later 3 delivers a scheduled message, any other messages pending delivery in your Outbox will also be delivered.
  2. Scheduled drafts are locked to a particular Thunderbird profile and will only be delivered by a Thunderbird running against the same profile that originally scheduled them. This means that if you use Thunderbird on multiple computers to schedule messages, you need to keep it running on all of those computers for the messages to be delivered. You can “transfer” a draft from one profile to another if need be by editing and rescheduling it.
  3. Some IMAP servers prevent Send Later 3 from working by discarding the “X-Send-Later” headers that it uses to keep track of message scheduled delivery times. You can tell that this is happening if you schedule a message for delivery, but then (a) the scheduled time does not show up in the “Send Later” column in the Drafts folder and (b) when you look at the message header with View > Message Source, there are no “X-Send-Later” headers. To work around this problem, you need to store your drafts for the affected account in some other Drafts folder, e.g., the one underneath Local Folders. You can set this preference by going to Tools > Account Settings… or Edit > Account Settings… and viewing the “Copies & Folders” page for the affected account.
  4. Scheduling messages for delivery currently does not work properly when “Work Offline” is enabled.
  5. Send Later 3 is not yet compatible with UseBccInstead.
  6. If you use distribution lists within Thunderbird and you add a distribution list to a message and then Send Later 3, the list will be expanded when you schedule it, not when it is sent. Any changes you make to the list between when you schedule the message and when it is sent will not be reflected in the sent message.
  7. Send Later 3 is partially incompatible with the “Defer” feature of the Mail Tweak thunderbird add-on. In particular, if you have “Defer” enabled with Mail Tweak, then the Send Later dialog will pop up every time you click the “Send” button in a compose window or type Ctrl-Enter. You can click “Send Now” at that point to send the message immediately, but the extra click is annoying. Note that Mail Tweak is not compatible with recent versions of Thunderbird, so there are no plans to fix this issue.

Thunderbird must be running for scheduled messages to be sent

You need to keep Thunderbird running (and your computer turned on!) for Send Later 3 to be able to send scheduled messages. It runs within Thunderbird, which means that when you exit from Thunderbird, it’s not around to check for messages to be sent. If you fail to leave Thunderbird running over the delivery time of one or more messages, then those messages will be delivered shortly after the next time you start Thunderbird.

Note that there are various methods and tools for waking up your computer automatically at a pre-specified time, in case you don’t want to keep it running constantly until it’s time to send the messages. For Windows, for example, see: [1], [2], [3]. For Linux, see [1]. You can schedule your Mac to wake up automatically by opening System Preferences and clicking on “Energy Saver” and then “Schedule”.

Alternatively, see below for a description of how to run Thunderbird on a server to deliver your messages for you.

Return receipts don’t work

If you enable the Return Receipt option on a message you are composing, and then you schedule the message to be sent later, when it is sent, no return receipt will be requested. Unfortunately, fixing this requires significant changes to the internal architecture for how scheduled messages are sent, and the changes are difficult since the core Thunderbird components involved are completely undocumented, so I don’t know when I’ll be able to find the time to fix the problem. In the meantime, here’s a workaround (thanks to about.com):

  1. Open the Thunderbird options dialog with Tools > Options… or Edit > Preferences…
  2. Click “Advanced” and then “Config Editor…” and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button if it asks you to.
  3. Enter “mail.compose.other.header” in the filter box.
  4. Double-click on the mail.compose.other.header setting and set it to “Disposition-Notification-To”. If it already has a non-empty value, add a comma and then “Disposition-Notification-To” to the end of it.
  5. When you are composing a message for which you want a return receipt and which you want to schedule to be sent later, then click on an empty line in the message header in the compose window, select “Disposition-Notification-To” in the drop-down, and then enter your email address as the value of the header.

If you want to automatically request a return receipt for every message you send, so that you don’t have to do it manually each time you schedule a message to be sent later, do the following (thanks to MozillaZine):

  1. Open the advanced configuration editor as described above.
  2. Enter “useremail” in the filter box and scan through the matches to find the email address of the account which you want to generate return receipts. Remember the “id#” for that account, where “id#” here and below means the characters “id” followed by a number which is different for each of your configured accounts.
  3. Enter “mail.identity.id#.headers” to find out if there are already custom headers configured for the account. If not, then right-click in the settings area to create a new string setting with that name.
  4. Put “receipt” as the value of the setting if it’s empty, or append “,receipt” to the end of the existing value.
  5. Create a new string setting called “mail.identity.id#.header.receipt”, and set its value to “Disposition-Notification-To: address“, where address is the email address to which you would like return receipts sent.

Errors you might encounter

“Error sending unsent messages”

If you’re reading this section, it’s probably because you got a pop-up alert that said this (or the equivalent in another language):

Send Later 3: Error copying scheduled message to Outbox for delivery (code %x). Send Later 3 has been disabled! See http://blog.kamens.us/send-later-3/#outbox-copy-failure.

This means that Send Later 3 encountered an error when attempting to copy a scheduled message from your Drafts folder to your Outbox for delivery. Because of this error, it’s possible that things are in an inconsistent state, such that the message in question is in your Outbox and your Drafts folder at the same time. If this is the case, then there is a risk that Send Later 3 will keep trying to send it over and over again every minute, and as a result many copies of the message could end up being sent. To prevent this from happening, Send Later 3 disables itself temporarily. You should:

  1. Check your Outbox (under Local Folders) to see if there is a scheduled message stuck there waiting to be sent. If so, and the message looks complete, run run File > Send Unsent Messages to send it. If the message looks incomplete, delete it.
  2. If there was no message in your Outbox, or if it was incomplete and you deleted it, then you’re probably fine. Restart Thunderbird to turn Send Later 3 back on.
  3. Otherwise, check your Drafts folder to see if there’s another copy there of the message that you just sent from your Outbox, and if so, delete it from Drafts (unless it’s a recurring message, in which case you should open and reschedule it for the next time you want it to be sent). After doing this, restart Thunderbird to turn Send Later 3 back on.
  4. If the problem happens again, contact me and I’ll try to help you figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it.

“Error copying recurring message”

If you’re reading this section, it’s probably because you got a pop-up alert that said this (or the equivalent in another language):

Send Later 3: Error copying recurring message into Drafts folder (code %x). Send Later 3 has been disabled! See http://blog.kamens.us/send-later-3/#drafts-copy-failure.

This means that Send Later 3 sent a recurring message and then tried to save a new copy of it in your Drafts folder with the next scheduled date for it to be sent, but an error occurred while saving the new draft. It’s possible that the error is specious and the draft was saved successfully, and it’s possible that the draft was lost because of the error. There’s no way for the add-on to tell, so it disables itself just to be save. You should:

  1. Check your Sent Items folder to find out which scheduled message was just sent.
  2. Check your Drafts folder to check if the message is there with the correct next scheduled delivery date. If so, you’re fine, and you can restart Thunderbird to turn Send Later 3 back on.
  3. If the message was lost from your Drafts folder, then copy it from your Sent Items folder into your Drafts folder, double-click on it to edit the draft, and then reschedule it for the next time you want it to be delivered with the correct recurrence. Then restart Thunderbird to turn Send Later 3 back on.
  4. If the problem happens again, contact me and I’ll try to help you figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it.

Corrupt drafts folder

If you’re reading this section, it’s probably because you got a pop-up alert that said something like this (or the equivalent in another language):

Send Later 3: Folder URL-of-Drafts-folder may be corrupt. Please open its properties and repair it. See http://blog.kamens.us/send-later-3/#corrupt-drafts-error/.

The root cause of this issue is actually an intermittent Thunderbird bug which sometimes causes folders to become corrupted; it is not due to a bug in Send Later 3, but the add-on is warning you about it so you can fix the underlying issue and keep the add-on working properly for you.

If you are able to determine from the error message which Drafts folder is corrupt, and you can see that folder in the Thunderbird folder list, then do just what the error pop-up says: right-click on the folder, select “Properties”, and click on the “Repair” button.

If that doesn’t fix the problem, or if it isn’t obvious which folder is causing the problem, then do the following:

  1. Open a compose window.
  2. Add an email address and some text to the draft, just so that it’s not totally empty.
  3. Iterate through all of the identities, i.e., the email address / account combinations you are able to select in the drop-down next to “From:”.
  4. For each identity, click “Save” to save the draft in the drafts folder for that identity. This will force Thunderbird to create the Drafts folder if it doesn’t already exist.
  5. When you’re done, close the compose window and delete the draft from the last Drafts folder. Thunderbird should have already been smart enough to remove it from the others as you iterated through them.
  6. When all that is done, repair all of the drafts folders as described above.

If this doesn’t fix the problem for you, then email me and I’ll try to help.

Advanced usage

Hot keys

You can hit Alt-1, Alt-2, or Alt-3 in the pop-up to activate the first, second or third preset key, respectively.

You can hit the “Esc” key in the pop-up to cancel and go back to editing the message.

You can hit Ctrl-Enter in the pop-up to send the message at the specified time, i.e., hitting Ctrl-Enter is equivalent to clicking the “Send Later at specified time” button.

You can hit Alt-N in the pop-up (or the equivalent in other languages) to send the message right now, i.e.,, it is equivalent to clicking the “Send Now” button.

Recurring messages

You can schedule a message to be sent repeatedly by selecting “daily”, “weekly”, “monthly” or “yearly” in the Send Later 3 pop-up. Immediately after Send Later 3 delivers the message, it calculates a new delivery time for it based on the frequency you specified and saves a new draft back into your Drafts folder with the new delivery time. This will continue for as long as you leave the message in your Drafts folder with recurrence enabled. To stop the message from being delivered anymore, remove it from your Drafts folder, or edit the draft and then save it without scheduling.

Here are some things to keep in mind about recurring messages:

  • You can’t use the preset buttons to schedule recurring messages, i.e., you have to explicitly specify the first delivery time for the message in the controls at the top of the pop-up window. To make this clear, when you select recurrence in the pop-up, the preset buttons are automatically disabled.
  • You can’t use the toolbar to schedule recurring messages. Also, if you edit a draft that was previously scheduled with recurrence, the toolbar buttons are disabled and you need to use the pop-up to reschedule it.
  • If you schedule a monthly message for the 29th, 30th or 31st of the month, then there will be months in which it will actually be sent on the 1st, 2nd or 3rd of the next month. For example, if you schedule a message for the 30th, then on February in a leap year it will be sent on March 1 and again on March 30, and on February in a non-leap year it will be sent on March 2 and again on March 30. The day of the month on which you originally scheduled it will be preserved, so it’ll always be sent on that day in months which actually have it.
  • Similarly, if you schedule a yearly message on February 29, then it’ll be delivered on March 1 in non-leap years.
  • If several scheduled send times for a message pass without Thunderbird being running, then the next time you run Thunderbird, it’ll only send the messages once for that interval. For example, if you have a daily message scheduled, and you leave Thunderbird shut down for a week, then when you start it up, it’ll only send one copy of that message instead of seven, and then reschedule it for delivery again tomorrow.

Replacing BlunderDelay with Send Later 3

Many people have asked if it is possible to emulate the functionality of BlunderDelay with Send Later 3. BlunderDelay is a simple add-on that periodically tells Thunderbird to send the messages in your Outbox. The idea is that if you use Thunderbird’s “Send Later” command instead of “Send”, then your messages go into the Outbox and then are sent a few minutes later by BlunderDelay, so you have a few minutes to make corrections or change your mind about sending your message.

A future version of Send Later 3 will make this functionality really easy to enable. In the meantime, however, it is possible to emulate BlunderDelay, and in fact to do a better job of what BlunderDelay tries to do, with a little work:

  • Set up one of the shortcut buttons as described above to have a delay of however many minutes you want all of your outgoing messages to wait before sending. Enable this button to be displayed in the toolbar, and customize the compose window toolbar to add the Send Later 3 buttons. You may also wish to disable the display of the Send Later 3 drop-downs in the toolbar as described above.
  • If you want to prevent yourself from accidentally sending a message immediately, customize the compose window toolbar and remove the Send button completely, and/or use the keyconfig extensionto rebind Ctrl-Enter to execute the following JavaScript, where “#” is the number of minutes you want your messages to be delayed: 
    Sendlater3ComposeToolbar.CallSendAfter(#);"

    Alternatively, you can enable the “‘Send’ does ‘Send Later’” option described above, so if you click Send or type Ctrl-Enter, the Send Later 3 prompt dialog will pop up.

  • If you’d like, you can do other things with the keyconfig extension to suit your tastes. For example, if all you ever want to use Send Later 3 for is this basic delay functionality, you could leave the Send button and Ctrl-Enter alone, but change the key binding for Ctrl-Shift-Enter so it executes the JavaScript shown above.

Dynamic values for preset buttons

While the preset buttons are a convenient way to easily to delay a message by a constant amount of time, you may sometimes want to do something more clever. For example, suppose you would like there to be a button to schedule a message to be sent at 8:30am on the next weekday? Fortunately, Send Later 3 allows you to do this.

In a nutshell, instead of specifying how many minutes into the future the message should be sent, you can specify the name of a JavaScript function which calculates and returns a number, and the message will be sent that many minutes in the future.

Here are the details of how to do this:

  1. Install the userChromeJS add-on, which allows you to easily write your own JavaScript code to be loaded into Thunderbird when it starts up.
  2. Find the userChrome.js file created by userChromeJS. It will be in the “chrome” subfolder of your Thunderbird profile folder.
  3. Using your favorite text editor, put a JavaScript function into userChrome.js which implements the logic you want. The function should take no arguments and return an integer representing the number of minutes by which the message should be delayed. See below for one example as well as a method of testing your function outside of Thunderbird.
  4. Open up the Send Later 3 preferences and modify a shortcut key so that its label indicates the behavior of your new function and its value, rather than a number, is the name of the function you inserted into userChrome.js. For example, if you were to use the sample function below to replace the first shortcut key, you would change the shortcut’s label to “8:30am next weekday” and its value to “MinutesTo0830Weekday”, which is the name of the function.

The following HTML file illustrates both a sample JavaScript function you might use to customize a shortkey key in Send Later 3, as well as a technique for testing that such a function performs as expected:

<html>
<head>
<script>
function MinutesTo0830Weekday() {
    var now = new Date();
    var d = new Date();
    if (d.getDay() == 5) { // Friday
        d.setTime(d.getTime()+1000*60*60*24*2);
    }
    else if (d.getDay() == 6) { // Saturday
        d.setTime(d.getTime()+1000*60*60*24);
    }
    d.setDate(d.getDate()+1);
    d.setHours(8);
    d.setMinutes(30);

    return Math.round((d.getTime()-now.getTime())/1000/60);
}
var m = MinutesTo0830Weekday();
document.write("<p>Send " + m + "minutes into the future.");
var d = new Date();
d.setTime(d.getTime()+m*60*1000);
document.write("<p>Send at " + d + ".");
</script>
</head>
</html>

Immediately below the function you intend to insert into userChrome.js, the function is invoked, its value is stored into a variable, and then that variable is written to the browser window. Then, that value is used to calculate the actual time at which the message will be sent, and that time is written to the browser window as well.

If you save this into a file with a “.html” extension and then double-click on it, your browser should open and display something like this:

Send 1900 minutes into the future.

Send at Mon Jul 19 2010 08:30:05 GMT-0400 (EST).

(You should now be able to tell exactly when I wrote the preceding paragraph!)

If the HTML file displays nothing, then, there’s probably a syntax error or something in your JavaScript function. View the error console to see what it is (in Firefox, run Tools > Error Console).

Once the function is working as expected in the HTML file in your browser, you can copy it into your userChrome.js and update your Send Later 3 preferences to start using it. Make sure to test it with email messages to yourself before using it “in production.” If it doesn’t behave as expected, then Tools > Error Console in Thunderbird may also be helpful at determining the problem.

Important, helpful userChromeJS hint: Sometimes changes to your userChrome.js file won’t load when you edit and restart Thunderbird. This problem and some workaround are described at MozillaZine.

Here’s another example function submitted by a user of the add-on whose company has a policy prohibiting emails from being sent on weekends and who also wanted a five-minute delay for all outgoing messages to give him time to change his mind.

function FiveMinutesOr0830Monday() {
  var now = new Date();
  var d = new Date();
  // If Monday after 8am, or another weekday or Friday before 6pm,
  // send emails in 5 minutes.
  if ((d.getDay() == 1 && d.getHours() > 7) ||
      (d.getDay() >= 2 && d.getDay() <= 4) ||
      (d.getDay() == 5 && d.getHours() < 18)) {
    // Send in 5 minutes -- time to change your mind!
    d.setTime(d.getTime() + 1000 * 60 * 5);
  }
  else {
    // On Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, send emails Monday morning.
    while (d.getDay() != 1) {
      d.setDate(d.getDate() + 1);
    }
    d.setHours(8);
    d.setMinutes(30);
  }

  return Math.round((d.getTime() - now.getTime()) / 1000 / 60);
}

The user who submitted this function has it bound to a preset button named “Send” and uses that button, rather than the standard Thunderbird “Send” button, to send all of his messages.

Suppressing scheduled message delivery

If you set the preference “extensions.sendlater3.senddrafts” to false in the advanced config editor (described above), then Send Later 3 won’t deliver scheduled drafts when their time comes; it’ll just leave them in your Drafts folder as if their delivery time has not yet arrived.

In case you are wondering what use this might have…

One clever Send Later 3 user decided to eliminate the requirement for Thunderbird to be running all the time to deliver scheduled messages, by writing an independent service to scan for and deliver scheduled messages from his IMAP Drafts folder. Unfortunately, if he happened to be running Thunderbird when a draft was scheduled to be sent, his Thunderbird and his service might have tried to deliver the same draft at the same time, thus causing unpredictable behavior and/or duplicate messages. He can avoid this issue by setting the “senddrafts” preference to false.

Server-side Send Later 3

If you want scheduled drafts to be sent even when your computer is shut down or Thunderbird isn’t running, and you have access to a server somewhere on which you can keep Thunderbird running all the time, here’s how you can set things up to have scheduled messages sent via that server.

  1. Use IMAP, not POP3, to access the email account in question. Otherwise, Thunderbird can’t store your scheduled drafts on the mail server and the server-side Thunderbird won’t be able to read and send them.
  2. Install Thunderbird on the server.
  3. If you can, set up the server to log you in automatically when it reboots, to start Thunderbird automatically when you log in, etc. I.e., do as much as you can to ensure that Thunderbird will stay running all the time.
  4. Configure your email account into Thunderbird on the server.
  5. On the client, set extensions.sendlater3.senddrafts to false as described above.
  6. On the client, use the advanced config editor to find the value of the preference extensions.sendlater3.instance.uuid. Copy the value into a text file or save it in some other way.
  7. On the server, use the advanced config editor to set extensions.sendlater3.instance.uuid to the value you copied from the client.

After you follow these steps, the client will stop sending out scheduled messages, and the server will start sending them out instead, since you’ve tricked it into thinking it is the same “instance” of Send Later 3 as the client.

If you use Send Later 3 on multiple clients, e.g., on a desktop and a laptop, then you can make the value of extensions.sendlater3.instance.uuid the same on all of them, as long as extensions.sendlater3.senddrafts is only set to true in one Thunderbird, i.e., the one that you keep running all the time.

Remember that this only works if Thunderbird stays running on the server. Don’t forget to keep an eye on it and restart it if it shuts down. If you want to be especially careful, you can schedule a recurring message to yourself as a simple monitor — if you don’t receive the recurring message at the scheduled time, you know that Thunderbird on the server has stopped running and you can log in and restart it.

Making “Send” do “Send Later” only some of the time

You may be in a situation where some of the time, you want to make sure to schedule every message you send, while other times, you want to send messages right away. For example, you might catch up on work late at night, but letting your clients know that might give them the incorrect impression that you don’t mind if they call you at god-awful hours :-) .

With Send Later 3 and userChromeJS, we can make that happen.

First, install userChromeJS and locate userChrome.js as described above.

Next, put something like this in userChrome.js:

// Set up a timer to call a function every five minutes to check
// whether we want the "Send" button to actually do "Send Later".

// This is the function that the timer will call.
var SendButtonPrefCallback = {
    notify: function(timer) {
	var now = new Date();
	// Sunday or Saturday
	var weekend = now.getDay() == 0 || now.getDay() == 6;
	// Before 9am
	var early = now.getHours() < 9;
	// After 5pm
	var late = now.getHours() > 4;
	// Put it all togther
	var do_popup = weekend || early || late;
	// Set the appropriate Send Later 3 preference
	var prefService = Components
	    .classes["@mozilla.org/preferences-service;1"]
	    .getService(Components.interfaces.nsIPrefBranch);
	prefService.setBoolPref("extensions.sendlater3.sendbutton", do_popup);
    }
}

// This is the variable that the timer will be stored in.
var SendButtonPrefTimer = null;

// Now set up the timer.
if (! SendButtonPrefTimer) {
    SendButtonPrefTimer = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/timer;1"]
	.createInstance(Components.interfaces.nsITimer);
    SendButtonPrefTimer.initWithCallback(
	SendButtonPrefCallback,
	300000,
	Components.interfaces.nsITimer.TYPE_REPEATING_SLACK
    );
}

// Note: This timer's going to run in every open Thunderbird window,
// but there really isn't any harm in that, so it's easier to just let
// that happen then to try to figure out how to make it run in only
// one window.

Then restart Thunderbird to reload userChrome.js, and you’re all set!

The example above tells Thunderbird to make “Send” do “Send Later” on weekends and on weekdays before 9am and after 5pm. You can tweak the function shown above to have whatever arbitrary behavior you want.

Troubleshooting

Messages don’t send or send multiple times

If Send Later 3 fails to deliver messages at the scheduled time, or if scheduled messages are delivered repeatedly, the most likely cause is a corrupted Outbox folder. A corrupted Outbox may even cause Thunderbird to crash when it tries to deliver scheduled messages.

Note that a corrupted outbox is not Send Later 3′s fault… There are bugs in other parts of Thunderbird, which can cause the Outbox folder to be corrupted. In any case, if your messages aren’t being delivered or are being delivered multiple times, then the first thing you should try is clearing your Outbox. Here’s how to do that:

  1. Make sure the “Outbox” folder under “Local Folders” doesn’t have any messages in it (because we’re about to delete the folder). If it does, and you want to save them, move them into your Drafts folder to be resent later.
  2. Right-click (on Mac, perhaps ctrl-click) on “Local Folders” and select “Settings…”.
  3. Note the directory in which your local folders are stored.
  4. Browse to that directory.
  5. Exit completely from Thunderbird.
  6. Delete Outbox and Outbox.msf in the Local Folders directory if they exist. Also delete “Unsent Messages” and “Unsent Messages.msf” if they exist. If neither of them exists, then you’ll have to use the advanced configuration editor (described above) in Thunderbird and look at the setting mail.default_sendlater_uri to find out the name of your Outbox folder on disk and then delete it (after exiting again from Thunderbird).
  7. Try scheduling a message with Send Later 3 again and see if the problem is gone.

Debug logging

If you ask me for help with a problem you are having with the add-on that I can’t reproduce myself, then I may ask you to enable debug logging on the add-on, perform some task with debug logging enabled, and then send me the resulting debug log. Here are the instructions for how to do that.

  1. Exit from Thunderbird.
  2. On Windows:
    1. Open a command window.
    2. Run “cd %ProgramFiles%\Mozilla Thunderbird”.
    3. Run “thunderbird -console”.
  3. On Linux:
    1. Open a terminal window.
    2. Run “thunderbird >| /tmp/thunderbird.log 2>&1″.
  4. On Mac OS:
    1. Open a terminal window.
    2. Run “/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin >| /tmp/thunderbird.log 2>&1″.
  5. Go to “Tools > Add-ons”.
  6. Click on “Send Later 3″.
  7. Click on “Preferences” or “Options”.
  8. Click on the “Advanced” tab.
  9. Change “Dump log level” to “All” (or whatever other value I tell you to change it to).
  10. Click on “Close”.
  11. Close the “Add-ons” window.
  12. Do whatever task I told you to do with debug logging enabled.
  13. Repeat steps 4-10 above, but this time change the setting to “Fatal” instead of “All”.
  14. On Windows:
    1. Find the console window that Thunderbird opened with all the debug logging in it.
    2. Right-click on the title bar of the console window and do “Edit > Select All”.
    3. Hit Enter to copy the selected text.
    4. Paste the copied text into an email message to me.
  15. On Linux or Mac OS:
    1. Exit from Thunderbird.
    2. Email me the file /tmp/thunderbird.log as an attachment or paste its contents into an email message to me.

Helping to improve the add-on

Translations

If the add-on’s messages display in a different language than the rest of Thunderbird, then that means that it hasn’t been translated for your language.

Translating the add-on is quite easy. All you have to do is load six text files into an editor and translate about fifty strings in them into your language. Depending on your preference, these strings can start out before you translate them as any of the other languages that the add-on already supports (as of this writing, the supported languages are English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, and Polish).

If you are interested in helping to improve the add-on by translating it into your language, I’d love to hear from you. Thanks!

Running beta releases

Usually, before I release a new version of the add-on for everyone, I release one or more beta releases to test the changes in a smaller user base. I do my best to ensure that the beta releases are solid, but of course it’s more likely that something might be wrong with a beta release. If you are willing to take a bit of a chance of unstable behavior to help improve the add-on for everyone, you can switch to running beta releases by visiting the add-on’s download page, expanding the “Development Channel” section near the bottom of the page, and clicking the “Continue to Download” button. Once you do that, you will automatically get new beta releases of the add-on when they are released.

Getting help

The “Send Later 3 users” mailing list

The Send Later 3 users mailing list is a great place to ask questions about the add-on, chat with other users about how to use it, or discuss future enhancements with the developer.

Contacting the developer

Please do not post bug reports or requests for support as comments below (feature requests are fine, though!). If you need help using the add-on, please e-mail me instead and I will respond as soon as I can (which is usually very quickly). Thanks!

Other resources

The kind folks at TCH-Support have published a video tutorial in German of how to use Send Later 3. They’ve also produced an English version. Enjoy!

I have dedicated countless hours to developing and supporting Send Later 3. I believe in free software, and the add-on will be completely free for as long as I continue to maintain it, which will be, I hope, for a good long time.

Having said that, I am extremely grateful for the donations made by users like you,and the amount of time I devote to improving Send Later 3 is strongly influenced by them. Please click here to donate. A donation of $10 or more makes you eligible for listing, including a link, banner or button if you’d like, on the supporters list!

You can also support the add-on by writing a review. Even if you’ve written a review before, please do it again! Here’s why: reviews are linked to specific versions of the add-on, so when I release new versions and expire old ones, the reviews linked to them are removed from the site.

Also, if there is a specific feature you would like me to add, and you’re willing to fund its development, please email me and we can discuss it.

Of course, you should feel free to send me feature requests at any time, even ones you do not wish to fund; I’ll put them into my queue and get to them as soon as I can.

Send Later 3 Release notes

Release 3.3.8 (May 10, 2012)

If you like Send Later 3, please consider contributing to support its continued development (A donation of $10 or more makes you eligible for listing, including a link, banner or button if you’d like, on the supporters list!) or writing a review (even if you’ve written one before). Thanks!

You can also be very helpful with minimal effort by beta-testing new versions of the add-on. I do my best to test new versions thoroughly, but I can miss things, so the more people I have testing new versions with me, the more likely it is that they will work for everyone. I fix problems discovered by beta testers very quickly, and if you do encounter a problem, you can always revert to the previous non-beta version until I am able to fix it. So please, help make Send Later 3 better for everyone by signing up as a beta tester! See the user guide for more information if you’re interested. Thank you.

Don’t forget to join the mailing list!

Changes since 3.3.7:

  • Change the label on the “Passthrough to Send Later” button to “Put in Outbox” and change its tooltip to be clearer as well. This is an attempt to fix the most common usage error people experience with this add-on, which is clicking this button when they should be clicking “Send Later at time(s) specified above”. Thank you very much to the Send Later 3 translators who assisted with this change!
  • Change the font sizes and colors in the Send Later 3 dialog to make the primary functionality group clearer and attract the eye better, primarily to help people avoid clicking the “Put in Outbox” button when they should be clicking “Send Later at time(s) specified above”.
  • Fix the display of the drop-down menus in the compose toolbar on Thunderbird 2 on platforms other than Linux.
  • Add a missing tooltip for the Send Later button in the compose toolbar on Thunderbird 2.
  • When displaying the release notes, scroll directly to the release notes for the version of the add-on that the user has installed.
  • When asking the user to make a donation, make the request before sending the message rather than afterward, because otherwise on some platforms, e.g., Mac OS X, the donation request window disappears when the compose window is dismissed.
  • New Simplified Chinese translation from yfdyh000 at BabelZilla.
  • The French and Dutch translations have been updated slightly as well as moved to a different location within the innards of the add-on. If you use one of these translations, you might notice that some of the strings have changed, but otherwise they should continue to work just fine. If they don’t, please let me know.Compatible up to Thunderbird 15.0a1.
  • (non-functional change) Remove unnecessary, empty translation string “separator.label”.
  • (non-functional change) Hard-code emacs coding-system into ambiguous files to avoid inadvertently saving them with the wrong coding system.

Release 3.3.7 (March 27, 2012)

Changes since 3.3.5:

  • In the error pop-up that appears when there is a corrupt Drafts folder that the add-on is unable to read, display a link to the section of the user guide which explains in detail what to do about this problem.
  • Restructure how the add-on’s code is loaded to fix negative interactions with other add-ons. Specifically, this add-on was previously preventing the icons for the Enigmail and Dictionary Switcher add-ons from appearing at the bottom of message compose windows.
  • Fix a bug introduced in version 3.3.6 when I updated the internal identifiers used in various components of the add-on as requested by the addons.mozilla.org editors. This bug was causing the scheduling pop-up to sometimes fail to schedule messages properly, as well as causing the scheduled send time to sometimes fail to display for scheduled messages.
  • Fix a couple of coding errors introduced in 3.3.6 when the add-on’s code was restructured to fix negative interactions with other add-ons. These coding errors don’t affect recent versions of Thunderbird but do affect Thunderbird 2 and perhaps some intervening versions as well.
  • Add a new hidden preference, extensions.sendlater3.send_while_offline. This preference is currently set to true by default. It can be changed using the advanced configuration editor.
    When this preference is true and the scheduled delivery time of a message arrives while Thunderbird is in offline mode, the message is moved into the Outbox and timestamped as of that time. When it is eventually delivered after you go online, the Date in the sent message will therefore correspond to its scheduled send time. As already noted, this is the default behavior and consistent with previous versions of the add-on.
    On the other hand, when this preference is false, messages whose scheduled delivery times have passed will not be moved into Outbox and timestamped until you go back online, which means the Date in the sent message will be when you went back online, not when the message was scheduled to be sent.
    I am interested in hearing from users which of these two behaviors you think is more correct, so that I can determine which should be the default and whether the setting should be visible in the preferences dialog. Please email me (jik+sendlater3@kamens.us) and let me know what you think.
  • Add a Finnish translation. Than you to Samtron-Translations!
  • Add the Japanese translation to the install manifest so the add-on’s description is displayed in Japanese (for Japanese users) in the add-on manager.
  • Fix broken donation links. Addons.mozilla.org’s layout changed, and the old links stopped working.
  • Compatible up to Thunderbird 14.0a1.
  • Add some debugging code to help me figure out why one user is seeing the scheduling pop-up when he clicks the “Send” button when he shouldn’t be.
  • (non-functional change) Remove the inclusion of a JavaScript script that the add-on wasn’t actually using, to prevent the unnecessary creation of extra global symbols. Change requested by the addons.mozilla.org editors.
  • (non-functional change) Change the identifiers used within the code for various components of the add-on, to reduce the likelihood of namespace conflicts with other add-ons. Change requested by the addons.mozilla.org editors.

Release 3.3.6 (March 20, 2012)

Version 3.3.6 was removed after release because of a serious bug in it. Its release notes have been merged into the release notes for version 3.3.7, above.

Release 3.3.5 (February 29, 2012)

Changes since version 3.3.4:

  • The “Send Later” button that shows up when you compose a message while working offline should pop up the Send Later 3 dialog.
  • Fix a slow memory leak caused by a typographical error in a module uninitialization function.

Release 3.3.4 (February 15, 2012)

Changes since 3.3.3:

  • Make sorting by the “Send Later” column in Drafts folders work properly.
  • Add error checking for a rarely encountered error when one of the user’s Drafts folders is corrupt.
  • Remove the version number of the add-on from the message that displays at the bottom of the screen briefly when Thunderbird starts up. It doesn’t serve any useful purpose there and was forcing me to update two different files in the add-on every time I released a new version.
  • Translation updates. Thanks as always to my translators!
  • Compatible up to Thunderbird 13.0a1.

Release 3.3.3 (January 18, 2012)

Changes since version 3.3.2:

  • Add an accelerator key for the Send Now button in the pop-up dialog.
  • Add a preference to allow the Send Later pop-up to be bound to Alt-Shift-Enter instead of Ctrl-Shift-Enter, preserving the default behavior for Ctrl-Shift-Enter.
  • Compatible up to Thunderbird 12.0a1.

Release 3.3.2 (November 16, 2011)

Changes since version 3.3.1:

  • Support Postbox 3.
  • Fix bug: If you edited a previously scheduled draft, and then later composed a new message, it was possible for the default scheduled delivery time in the compose window to be initialized to the scheduled time for the previously edited draft, rather than to the current time.
  • Fix bug: The add-on is supposed to remove the scheduled send time from any draft you edit, when you start editing it, to avoid it accidentally being sent out while you were editing it. This functionality was not working properly for drafts that were followups or replies.
  • Fix release notes display to account for recent changes to Thunderbird internals.
  • Compatible up to Thunderbird 11.0a1.
  • Change some internal identifiers (not user-visible) to confirm to new coding standards for addons.mozilla.org.

Release 3.3.1 (October 25, 2011)

  • Compatible up to Thunderbird 10.0a1.
  • Fix a bug (I hope) which could cause recurring messages to be sent from the wrong identity and/or saved in the wrong Sent folder.
  • Add tooltip text to the Send Later button in the compose pane toolbar, so that if the user displays only icons in the toolbar, there’ll be a hint about what the button does if the user hovers over it. This change was suggested by “Bigpapa”.
  • Italian translation from “Cesare”.
  • Japanese translation from Ryo Matsui.
  • French translation updates from “Bigpapa”, who is now assisting with the French translation.
  • Minor updates to some other translations.
  • Change some debug logging messages to be more useful.

Release 3.3 (July 18, 2011)

Changes since release 3.2.9:

  • Scanning Drafts folders for scheduled messages is now several orders of magnitude faster and uses very little network traffic. You can now safely use Send Later 3 with Drafts folders with hundreds or even thousands of messages in them.
  • Messages are no longer spell-checked multiple times when “‘Send’ does ‘Send Later’” is enabled.
  • The scheduled send time of a draft is now canceled when you start editing it, and a warning pop-up informs you of this. This is to prevent the draft from being sent out from under you while you are in the process of editing it. If you don’t want to see the pop-up every time you edit a scheduled draft, you can set the preference extensions.sendlater3.show_edit_alert to false in Thunderbird’s advanced config editor.
  • The layout and button labels of the prompt window have been adjusted slightly to make them clearer. Thanks to Jasir Alavi for the great UI improvement suggestions.
  • The add-on no longer attempts to deliver messages from your Outbox to the mail server when “Work Offline” is enabled in Thunderbird. Before this fix, if the scheduled send time of a message arrived when “Work Offline” was enabled, Send Later 3 would attempt to deliver it and Thunderbird would get confused.
  • New translated strings to go with the new functionality. Thanks as always to my translators!

Release 3.2.9 (June 19, 2011)

Changes since 3.2.7:

  • Compatible with Thunderbird 5.
  • Swedish translation from Mikael Hiort af Ornäs. Thanks, Mikael!
  • Fix a bug first introduced in version 3.2.6: The drop-down values in the compose toolbar are supposed to be updated to the current time whenever a new draft is opened and are supposed to track the current time until / unless they are modified by the user. This has been broken since 3.2.6 but is now fixed.
  • Do a better job of handling the unusual case of the default drafts folder being something other than Drafts within Local Folders.

Release 3.2.8 (June 15, 2011)

Release 3.2.8 was pulled shortly after release due to a regression which is fixed in release 3.2.9.

Release 3.2.8beta2 (June 12, 2011)

Known issue with Thunderbird 5: When you add Send Later 3 to the compose window toolbar and try to use the drop-downs to set the scheduled send time, you can’t see the values in the “minutes” drop-down. This is a bug in the Thunderbird core, not in Send Later 3, and I don’t know of any decent fix for it short of waiting for the Thunderbird core maintainers to fix it. In the meantime, click on the minutes field and then use the keyboard to type the minutes value you want, or use the Ctrl-Shift-Enter popup to schedule delivery instead of the dropdowns in the toolbar.

Changes in this release:

  • Compatible with Thunderbird 5.
  • Do a better job of handling the unusual case of the default drafts folder being something other than Drafts within Local Folders.
  • Fix a bug first introduced in version 3.2.6: The drop-down values in the compose toolbar are supposed to be updated to the current time whenever a new draft is opened and are supposed to track the current time until / unless they are modified by the user. This has been broken since 3.2.6 but is now fixed.

Release 3.2.8beta1 (April 14, 2011)

  • Swedish translation from Mikael Hiort af Ornäs. Thanks, Mikael!

Release 3.2.7 (March 30, 2011)

  • Add “‘Send’ does ‘Send Later’” functionality.
  • Prompt the user periodically to ask if s/he wants to make a donation to support further development of the add-on. Allow these prompts to be stopped by clicking the “Stop asking” button.
  • Fix the bug which was sometimes preventing the “Send Later” column from being displayed in the Drafts folder.
  • Add links to the preferences page for emailing the author, viewing the user manual, or making a donation. (Note: In Thunderbird 2, the donation link is not available, and the user manual link is text rather than a clickable link)
  • In Thunderbird 3, display release notes when the add-on is updated.
  • Update a number of foreign-language translation strings that were previously defaulting to English.

If you like the new features in this release, please consider making a donation.

Release 3.2.6 (January 28, 2011)

  • Support recurring scheduled messages!
  • Temporarily disable delivery of scheduled messages if a serious error occurs, and tell the user where to go on the Web to get help resolving the problem.
  • Change the translations so that when the name of the add-on is referred to, it’s always referred to as “Send Later 3″ in English.
  • Some translation updates.

Release 3.2.5 (January 17, 2011)

  • Support Thunderbird 2.
  • Support Postbox 2.
  • When scheduling a reply or forward, mark the original message replied or forwarded.
  • Allow Send Later 3 to removed completely from the Status Bar by unsetting a new preference (which defaults to being set).
  • Display an alert if an error is encountered when attempting to deliver messages. this is usually caused by a corrupt Outbox folder, so point the user at the instructions above for fixing the corrupt folder.

Release 3.2.4 (January 13, 2011)

  • Polish translation from Maciej Kobuszewski.
  • Fix a couple of typos in the French translation.
  • Attempt to work around a problem with Thunderbird’s core “updateFolder” function sometimes throwing an error and causing Send Later 3 to fail to detect a scheduled draft. The workaround is to ignore the error rather than letting it abort the Send Later 3 code, since there’s nothing we can do about the error anyway.

Release 3.2.3 (November 25, 2010)

  • Change the progress meter from a “spinning” meter which moves constantly while the add-on is working, into an actual progress meter which advances to 100% as the add-on finishes its work. This provides more information to the user than before and also reduces the amount of CPU consumed by the add-on.
  • When a scheduled message is saved into a Drafts folder which is not being checked periodically by the add-on because its “Check for new messages every…” checkbox is disabled, force a single check of the Drafts folder to ensure that the add-on knows about the newly scheduled message.
  • When popping up the scheduling dialog in a compose window, make focus start on the “hours” drop-down rather than the “Cancel” button so it is easier to schedule a message entirely with the keyboard, i.e., without using the mouse.
  • Make Ctrl-Enter anywhere in the compose window pop-up equivalent to clicking the “Send Later at specified time” button so it is easier to schedule a message entirely with the keyboard.
  • Work around a bug in Thunderbird which prevents the Send Later 3 drop-downs in the compose window toolbar from being updated when they are first added to the toolbar.

Release 3.2.1 (October 27, 2010)

  • Bug fix: Strip the “X-Send-Later-Uuid” header from the header of scheduled messages before sending them.
  • Send Later 3 no longer attempts to periodically contact IMAP servers whose “Check for new message every … minutes” checkboxes are unchecked in their Server Settings. This means that you can now have a configured IMAP account which is currently inaccessible without Send Later 3 causing “Connection to server … timed out” messages or the like to pop up every minute.
  • A new setting has been added to the preferences dialog to allow the date & time dropdowns and “Send Later” button to be omitted from the compose window toolbar, thus leaving only the preset buttons in the toolbar.
  • Bug fix: Allow the three preset buttons’ display in the compose window toolbar to be configured independently (previously, the toolbar display setting for the first button controlled all three of them).
  • Bug fix: Work around a Thunderbird bug so that when Send Later 3 is being used in one of its translated, non-English locales, the name of the add-on will still show up correctly in the add-ons list.
  • Improve the performance of dynamic preset buttons.

Release 3.2 (September 16, 2010)

  • Drafts saved with Send Later 3 are now “locked” to a particular Thunderbird profile. This means that a draft will only be delivered (at the scheduled time) by a Thunderbird running against the profile from which it was originally written. Therefore, you can now run Send Later 3 in Thunderbirds which talk to the same accounts from multiple computers without worrying about them conflicting with each other.
  • Fix a big memory leak by fixing a bug which was causing many superfluous entries to be inserted into some of the drop-down menus in the compose toolbar.
  • Fix a significant bug: When the user was using an IMAP Drafts folder and had configured the account so that deleted messages were marked deleted rather than moved to a different folder, scheduled messages were getting sent repeatedly.
  • Fix a bug discovered and reported by Fabian Möller: the delivery time of a message might have been scheduled incorrectly (wrong month) when the user attempted to schedule a message during some months on the 29th, 30th, or 31st of the month.
  • Mark compatible with Thunderbird 3.0, since there have been multiple reports from users who have tried it that it works fine.
  • Add translations:
    • Spanish from Milcom.es
    • German from Suzanne Iseli and Daniel S.
    • French from Didier Journois
  • Add translations for the add-on description which appears in the extensions manager.
  • Claim compatibility with 3.2a1pre and 3.3a1pre until proven otherwise.
  • Add a new hidden preference (i.e., you can get to it from the advanced config editor, but not from the Send Later 3 preferences window), “extensions.sendlater3.senddrafts”, which will cause Send Later 3 not to actually send any scheduled drafts if it is set to false. This is useful, e.g., if you want to use Send Later 3 for scheduling drafts but use some other tool for actually sending them.
Håkon
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130 Responses to “Send Later 3 Thunderbird Add-on”

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  1. sivakumar says:
    April 20, 2012 at 11:28 am

    Excellent add-on, really useful

    Reply
  2. Ronnie says:
    March 24, 2012 at 12:28 am

    Excellent Plugin. Thanks so much.. This is my favorite tool ! Very useful.

    Reply
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