Thunderbird scripting

I need to process a number of messages in my Thunderbird.app (Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Intel Core 2 Duo), delete a few based on some criteria, export some others, move a small part of them to a special folder and create a filing hierarchy to go with it all - programmatically.

With Outlook I used to enjoy VBScript + the COM object model: it would do all of the above simply and intuitively.

What can I use to achieve the same with Thunderbird?

If multiple options are available, here are my current preferences in terms of languages (althoug开发者_JAVA技巧h I can adapt to most things): Python, C++, AppleScript, PHP, Perl, Bash, ...

If I need to move to a Windows box to use .NET and the like, I can (yet I'd imaging the most popular bindings come from the open-source world?!) If there was a command-line tool that did what I need, I'd use that! (thunderbird.sh show messages; thunderbird.sh create folder X as child of folder Y;)

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You can develop Thunderbird extensions in a similar way to Firefox extensions in XUL and Javascript.

Try this tutorial.

This tutorial will introduce you to the components of a Thunderbird extension and will show you how to build your own.

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You could also look at the tbscript plugin, although it does have external dependencies - it uses Python.

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The tutorial linked to in the most popular answer as of today still works, but is outdated.

For current versions of Thunderbird, documentation is at https://developer.thunderbird.net. This has an add-on page that comes with a tutorial for developing a "Hello World" MailExtension.

The MailExtension API is new for Thunderbird 68 (although some parts were published for earlier versions) and allows one to write JavaScript to e.g. handle messages.

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If you need a general purpose GUI scripting solution, try Autohotkey, it's very calable.