Alexander FX

About me

Developer Information
Name Alexander FX
User since Jan. 9, 2010
Number of add-ons developed 0 add-ons
Average rating of developer's add-ons Not yet rated

My Reviews

SmartTemplate

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

The forwarding bug—where sometimes an extra (br) is inserted between the headers and the text of the forwarded message—does not happen with Outlook and it does not happen with the standard Thunderbook forwarding header table.
It happens with SmartTemplate when forwarding mail that was originally sent by Thunderbird, Apple Mail and, at times, GMail (among others).
As far as I can see, it is caused when the original HTML text does not start with a (div).
Your efforts to resolve this are certainly appreciated, gaby_hy, and I'm sure that you'll find a solution! Whatever small bugs remain (that's the nature of software), you're doing a great job.
In the meantime, thanks for version 0.5.4.

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.5.4). 

Minimize On Start and Close

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

Exactly what I need. Does exactly what it says, and does it almost perfectly (I use it on Thunderbird 2.0.23). What more can I say?
Defects?
If it could prevent the Thunderbird window from appearing at all, it would reach Nirvana (but that seems absolutely impossible to achieve). Also, the "Inform on New Mail" should be documented a bit more, but it's easy enough to figure out.
In any case, five stars without question.

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (1.3.0). 

SmartTemplate

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

Thanks for version 0.5.2. It gets better every time!
In the meantime, however, I have noticed an odd bug in forwarding (replies aren't affected).
Sometimes an extra (br) is inserted between the headers and the text of the forwarded message.
This seems to happen with all messages originally sent via Thunderbird or Apple Mail, as well as some -- not all -- messages originally sent via GMail. It doesn't affect messages sent by Outlook or Outlook Express.
As far as I can tell, the extra line-break is added when the text of the original message doesn't start with a (div).
Can you reproduce this?

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.5.2). 

SmartTemplate

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

Some mail programs (usually webmail) put some pretty useless information after the timezone information.
For example, today I received an e-mail from a friend with the following date header:
Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:37:09 +0100 (Paris, Madrid)
Would it be possible to strip this useless information, so the header looks like this:
Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:37:09 +0100
Sorry to make additional requests, but this is such a good add-on that it's difficult to resist the temptation to make it perfect!

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.5.1). 

SmartTemplate

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

All previous issues fixed. It's now working great again. Your quick reaction time is really appreciated!
Just one minor point: the %....% option is indeed useful, but quotation marks are not stripped from these headers (e.g., %Reply-to%). I imagine that it will not be a big problem to fix for the next release.
In the meantime, thanks gaby_hy.

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.5.1). 

SmartTemplate

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

Apologies for the previous review, which was pretty incomprehensible since AMO removed all of my HTML tags. Here it is again, with parentheses used for HTML.

My SmartTemplate configuration looks like this:
(br)
(br)
(hr noshade="noshade" color="#C0C0C0" size="2" width="100%")
(div style="margin-top: 0.85em; margin-bottom: 0.85em;")
(font size="2" face="Tahoma")
(a style="text-decoration: none;")
(b)From: (/b)%from%(br)
(b)To: (/b)%to%{(br)
(b)CC: (/b) %cc%}(br)
(b)Sent: (/b)%datelocal% %date_tz%(br)
(b)Subject: (/b)%subject%
(/a)(/font)(/div)

With version 0.4.7, this worked without any problem. However, it's stopped working in version 0.5.0, since SmartTemplate now converts my headers into the following HTML:

(span id="IDstID")(br)(br)(hr color="#c0c0c0" noshade="noshade" size="2" width="100fromtodatelocaldate_tzsubject%</a")(/span)

This obviously produces completely blank headers. It seems that the culprit is the (hr); if I take that out, it works again.

I'm wondering what the code change was that created this problem. For the moment I'm going back to version 0.4.7, hoping that this bug can be fixed.

Seeing how responsive the developer is to our comments, I'm sure that we won't have to wait long!

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.5.0). 

SmartTemplate

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

When an add-on is so good that I can''t think of how it could be made better, then it's pretty near perfect. SmartTemplate does exactly what it says it does, and it does it extremely well. In addition, the developer not only listens and replies to user suggestions, but quickly incorporates those he can into the add-on. Thanks, gaby_hy.

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.4.6). 

SmartTemplate

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

Hi gaby_hy
When replying or forwarding an e-mail with no subject, SmartTemplate doesn't come into action. The default Thunderbird reply or forwarding headers (ugh!) are used instead. I tried to put the %subject% field in reserved brackets—"{" and "}"—but that didn't make any difference.
Hope this helps,
Alex FX

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.4.3). 

SmartTemplate

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

Thanks for your quick answer. This is a great addon. We all appreciate the work you're putting into this.
The possibility of adding timezone info to %datelocal% and stripping the quotation marks from %to% and %cc would really be cool.
Would it also be possible to add an option for replies and forwards to use the timezone of the original sender?
Also, just ignore what I wrote about quoted text; I was wrong. Sorry.
Incidentally, I have no problem with the RE or FW tags in the subject line.

Alex FX

PS: Bren2010, if you want to "turn off the vertical blue line on the LHS and RHS of the quoted original message", just add the lines below to your userContent.css file:

blockquote[type=cite] {
margin-top: 0 !important;
margin-bottom: 0 !important;
border: none ! important; padding-left: 0px ! important; padding-right: 0px ! important; margin-left: 0px ! important; margin-right: 0px ! important;
}

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.4.3). 

SmartTemplate

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

This is an excellent addon. Says what it does and does it well.
Among other things, I can already see it taking the place of the "Reset Quote Header" Extension, which was excellent but hasn't been updated in ages.

A few possible, however:

1. At present, there is no way to automatically add timezone information (e.g., -7:00 or +2:00) to the the %datelocal% setting.

2. When replying or forwarding, the original e-mail is not treated as quoted text, which means that the Thunderbird spell-checker attempts to check the spelling of the original text as well as the new text. This can be a nuisance when the original e-mail is quite long.

3. The %to% and %cc% fields automatically add quotation marks when replying or forwarding e-mails received from Microsoft applications, among others. Thus, the address becomes "Joe Bloggs" rather than Joe Bloggs . Would it be possible to strip the quotation marks?

4. The last thing is something that I miss from Eudora (that was a long time ago!): the possibility to reply or forward messages using the original sender's time zone information in the reply header. People are much more likely to relate to replies when they can easily find the orginal e-mail on their computer.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

Alex FX

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (0.4.3).