Is there a preference setting in Thunderbird that would cause the highlighted line in the Inbox to be copied to the clipboard?
Recently I installed Thunderbird on my brother's desktop computer. He has vision problems and I was trying to help him by trying to use a free program name NaturalReader to tell him the sender and subject of his emails. He was using AOLMail but that program immediately opens an email if you click on it. Thunderbird allows him to highlight a line in the Inbox, but apparently does not (by default) copy the line to the clipboard where NaturalReader would be able to see it. The idea was highlight line, play it, then either delete it or hit the down arrow to point to the next email. If there is a profile option that could cause this to happen, please let me know how to use it. If not, this option would be valuable to have for the visually impaired.
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I attempted to contact the developer, but did not receive any reply.
Anyhow, I want to thank you for all your help. I guess if I want to pursue this further, I'll just have to look at the code and see what I can do. Fortunately, my brother's eye sight has improved a little from where it was. I am going to close this thread at this time
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The only feature I can think of that comes close to this is provided by the ImportExportTools add-on. If you right-click a message in the Threads Pane, there is an entry 'Copy to clipboard' and the choice of Message or Headers. Choosing Message would include the Subject, Sender, Date, Recipient and message body. Assuming you can interrupt the NaturalReader, that might provide sufficient information.
You might want to look at this add-on to increase the font in the Threads Pane and menus.
Изменено sfhowes
From your response, I take it that a profile switch that would do what I was looking for, does not exist at this time.
When I tried the ImportExportTools addon, both the message and headers "Copy to clipboard" functions put a whole lot of extraneous stuff in the clipboard as opposed to just what appears in the Inbox selected line.
Is there a reason why, when one selects a message entry in the Inbox, and then chooses 'Edit', the 'Copy' entry is unavailable? If it was available, what I am trying to achieve could be accomplished with those two keystrokes. If
The Edit/Copy command is not available when you select a message in the Threads Pane; it's intended for copying selections of a message in the Message Pane or a tab.
You probably noticed that the IET add-on can export a folder or selection of messages to an html or csv index, i.e. a list with Subject, Sender, Recipient, Date. Opening such a list would offer a way to copy each line with the desired info, but it would be done in parallel, outside of TB.
When you say the IET add-on can export a folder or selection of messages, I am confused. My brother' s actual messages are on the AOL IMAP server. The only thing in his computer's mail directories is the inbox.msf file in the weird mork format. I do not know how one has access to the displayed inbox that one sees when they open Thunderbird.
Since I am a retired programmer with OS experience, I think I'll attempt to build a customized Thunderbird when I can find the code that creates the Inbox display and a way to understand which message is currently selected. If I can do this I could automatically put the From and Subject information into a current-line file, which could be accessed by a Text to Speech app.
It would seem your brother's AOL account is set up to not download messages for offline access, i.e. the setting 'Keep messages in all folders...' is unchecked in Synchronization & Storage in Account Settings. In that case, messages are downloaded to the cache when selected, but not stored in an mbox file with the same name as the .msf file.
See the attached picture for the context menu options with IET. Exporting to an index should work even if only the headers are downloaded.
Export to an index in .csv format does contain all the required info for the whole Inbox (except that the Subject is truncated).
When one right clicks on a message and copies to clipboard, do you know how IET knows which message info that it needs to place there?
I'm not familiar with the inner workings of the add-on, but I think the author would be able to explain it to you:
Выбранное решение
I attempted to contact the developer, but did not receive any reply.
Anyhow, I want to thank you for all your help. I guess if I want to pursue this further, I'll just have to look at the code and see what I can do. Fortunately, my brother's eye sight has improved a little from where it was. I am going to close this thread at this time