Writing scripts that work with my emails

Question

I currently use Thunderbird as my email client and it has some filters, but that seems to be all I can program in it.

On several occasions, I heard people talk about their automated email workflow. One example:

When I do not get a reply to an email the script will send a “nag” email asking why I did not get a response yet.

Or another one:

I get so much mail that I cannot read them all. After a week, unread email is put on hold and the sender gets a “if it was important, reply to this email and it will be set to un-hold” email. The script then takes the answer and move it to back into the important folder.

I read about FiltaQuilla which seems nice, but it does not seem to be the kind of programming that I am looking for.

How can I write general purpose scripts like those? Do I need to write my own Python IMAP/SMTP client (if that is even possible) to to this or can I script it it, say JavaScript, in Thunderbird?

Solution

You might want to look at the StackOverflow question Thunderbird Scripting, which appears to cover much the same problem. The solution suggested there is to write your own plugin.

Alternatively, there's a plugin called tbscript (which I haven't tried, so no promises), which might do what you're after, although it does have external dependencies (Python and PyXPCOMExt)

Comments

[Oliver Salzburg]

Maybe relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)