PyThunderbird

OsProject

OsProject
edit
id	pyThunderbird
state	active
owner	WolfgangFahl
title	pyThunderbird
url	https://github.com/WolfgangFahl/pyThunderbird
version	0.1.0
description
date	2023-12-01
since	2020-10-24
until

Motivation

Thunderbird uses mailbox format and an sqlite database for keeping track of the mails. How can this setup be accessed with Python?

Installation

pip install pyThunderbird
# alternatively if your pip is not a python3 pip
pip3 install pyThunderbird 
# local install from source directory of pyThunderbird 
pip install .

upgrade

pip install pyThunderbird  -U
# alternatively if your pip is not a python3 pip
pip3 install pyThunderbird -U

Configuration

$HOME/.thunderbird.yaml

The yaml file has two entries per user

MacOS Example

joe:
  db: /Users/joe/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/klm97bfn.default/gloda.sqlite
  profile: /Users/wf/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/klm97bfn.default
kathy:
  db: /Users/kathy/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/war97k3r.default/gloda.sqlite
  profile: /Users/kathy/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/war97k3r.default

Linux example

in this example the server runs from an rsync'ed backup of the thunderbird files of the different users

user123:
  db: /hd/diskAlpha/backup/siteAlpha.com/user123/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/randomID1.default/global-messages-db.sqlite
  profile: /hd/diskAlpha/backup/siteAlpha.com/user123/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/randomID1.default
user456:
  db: /hd/diskBeta/backup/siteBeta.com/user456/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/randomID2.default/global-messages-db.sqlite
  profile: /hd/diskBeta/backup/siteBeta.com/user456/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/randomID2.default

Relevant Libraries

• https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/mailbox.html
• https://pypi.org/project/mboxattachments/

Links

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21625906/access-thunderbird-emails-by-python
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60938536/decoding-mail-subject-thunderbird-in-python-3-x
• https://medium.com/shanes-tech-tips/offlineimap-to-thunderbird-152bb02286f
• https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.python/c/sp-3_ddmgbA?pli=1
• https://wlsoft.de/?q=node/369
• https://github.com/rooper/thunderbirdscraper/blob/master/run.py
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26567843/reading-the-mail-content-of-an-mbox-file-using-python-mailbox/26567942