Changes in Thunderbird 76

accounts

  • Thunderbird 76 introduces the MailIdentity type for interacting with mail identities. Like the rest of the accounts API, it is mostly read-only as we believe that configuration of identities should only happen using the built-in UI.

  • The MailAccount type now contains a list of identities associated with that account. The default identity is listed first and other identities are in no particular order.

  • The accounts API now has a setDefaultIdentity(accountId, identityId) function.

compose

  • The ComposeDetails type now has an identityId field for getting or setting the identity associated with a message being composed.

mailTabs/messageDisplay

  • For consistency with other APIs and with browser WebExtensions (ie. those used in Firefox, etc.), some events that passed a numeric tab ID to listeners now pass an object representing the tab instead. This change is not backwards-compatible.

    The affected events are:

messages

  • The accountsRead permission is now required for all functions that accept a MailFolder argument. The permission was already required to obtain a MailFolder anyway, so this change should not break extensions.

experiments

  • For extensions with the addressBooks permission, a new addressBookManager object is available to WebExtensions experiment implementations. The addressBookManager provides the following functions to help you interact with the addressBooks, contacts and mailingLists APIs:

    • findAddressBookById, findContactById, findMailingListById to help you find “real” address book objects (nsIAbCard, nsIAbDirectory) for the IDs provided by the addressBooks API. Note that there is active development in the address book and these interfaces will be changing in the near term without public announcement.

    • convert to turn “real” objects back into API-friendly objects.

    For more information on these functions see the source code of the addressBooks APIs.

Bugzilla list of fixed WebExtension API defects in Thunderbird 76.