by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on Dec. 24, 2019 · permalink

Thanks for supporting SmartTemplate!
People really have no idea how much work making and maintaining a good Add-on is. With your contribution, you are keeping this project alive; the more people support it, the cheaper and better it will get.

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on Nov. 27, 2019 · permalink

it is - please see About this Add-on under the third heading "licensing". If you want to keep using Stationery, there is no problem as long as you stay behind using Thunderbird 60. I decided to fully monetize after it took several weeks of work to integrate the external HTML files and another several week to make my Add-on compatible with Thunderbird 68.

I also work on my Add-ons every day, providing free support and constantly improving them - had to already do a lot of unpaid work for v2.0 when Thunderbird 60 made a load of Add-ons incompatible. See: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/smarttemplate4/versions/

Also there are many many additional functions for extracting data from the replied to email in the Pro version. The Standard license is currently below 5$ for a whole year which is more than reasonable (renewals are cheaper).

SmartTemplate⁴ is "Free software" in the sense of that you can see all the source code and modify it to suit to your needs - only thing you can't do is create / publish a new version to compete with it. Free as in freedom, not beer.

https://github.com/RealRaven2000/SmartTemplate4/

Unlike a lot of other "free" software, SmartTemplate will never mine your data or sell your information for profit. If you prefer this way of monetization, feel free to use gmail, which reads your mails and tailors advertisements to your needs. I am only a single programmer but I find this behavior highly questionable.

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on Sept. 7, 2019 · permalink

Bitte nimm doch mal den support link her. Auf allen unseren Support Seiten ist unten ein mail link - "Contact us via Email"
http://smarttemplate4.mozdev.org/index.html
Das schwarz auf weiss hat aber nix mit SmartTemplate zu tun - Wahrscheinlich sind deine Standareinstellungen vermurkst, und in ST4 hast du Style settings drin die das korrigieren (?)

... Schau mal in Tb Optionen ➡ Verfassen ➡ HTML Optionen nach.. bitte den Rest per Email.

ich hatte einen Haufen Arbeit das Add-on für Thunderbird 68 kompatibel zu machen, da kann ich im Augenblick all die 1-Stern Reviews nicht wirklich brauchen. Aber meinen Benutzern helfe ich gerne weiter, dir muessen sich nur bei mir melden.

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on Aug. 22, 2019 · permalink

... or you could have asked for a free license. Maybe the Add-on wasn't for you, after all, there are alternatives. I still hope your employer pays you something for your work.

I had to make a choice to either give up my day job and keep working on the Add-ons fulltime to keep them up to date with the crazy changes that Mozilla is pushing down or walk away and and leave my user base unsupported. This would mean SmartTemplate would stop working from end of August. I had thought (and tried) any other ways and you will see soon how many free (as in beer) Add-ons will stop working once Thunderbird 68 is released.

Necessary changes, just to make sure it keeps working for ESR 2019 / 2020:
https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/updates/tb68

I answered 100s of support emails, helped people with their HTML / CSS problems and implemented new features to solve their problems, completely pro bono.

I still know that Monetizing ST⁴ was the correct way forward, but asking for voluntary donations / only have Pro License users finance this work was not the correct way. Also, a payment of 45cent/month for that work is not unreasonable; but you will not get anything even from the most generous user if you do not ask - donations were an absolute exception. Most people believe we are paid by Mozilla or some other big corporation that has "spare cash" - this is not the case.

If you don't want to ask for a free license, I would recommend using the quicktext Add-on instead.

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on Aug. 7, 2019 · permalink

Thanks for your opinion. To keep using the "free as in beer" version perpetually you can roll back to version 2.0 (released last December), and disable Add-on updates. Unfortunately, I cannot update that version for Thunderbird 68 for free anymore, but as long as you stay with Thunderbird 60 you should be fine.

By the way it's not 33% off, the standard license costs 33% of the pro license (5 bucks, so with taxes around 50cents / month), so it's actually 66% off compared to "pro", I updated the website today to make that clearer - I know that's a lot of money, so it only makes send if you use the Add-on's functionality regularly and save enough time through it to justify such an expense. I believe if it saves you 1 minute per workday that would be a time saving of 20 minutes / month - if you earn less than 5 bucks / hour it would not be worth it.

The license is annual because Mozilla pushes down breaking changes (I had about 3 man-months of work to update my Add-ons for 2020) which will make sure that Add-ons will not work anymore without major work by the developers. The income from Pro-licenses did not reflect the amount of work (I would have ended up working well below minimum wage) and I do have a family I need to feed.

Transitioning my existing users was a necessary risk I had to take. Consider the 7 years of free support and development I supplied (since I took over development in 2012) as a parting gift. Unfortunately, I do not keep track so I cannot know how long an individual user has used it or how much they have benefited.

Also, discouraging Add-on authors by downvoting their work will not increase the amount of useful software on the site. Should you decide to remove SmartTemplate⁴ and go with the update to Thunderbird 68, you will notice a lot of "free as in beer" Add-ons go away. I am actively encouraging other developers to look into monetizing their Add-on in order not to walk away from an ever breaking platform. We can see what happened with many many useful Add-ons after Firefox 57 deprecated classic add-ons. We are just at the bottom of the totem pole.

PS: I see you switched to ReplyWithHeader, thanks for finding an alternative that works for you - you may as well mention it in your review text - I encourage all my users who prefer their developers to work for nothing to check it out!

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on Aug. 2, 2019 · permalink

thanks!

Mark helped me build the support site and does some of the user support (especially German support) - he is also the one who managed the Add-on before I joined the project in 2012, when he was desperately looking for a developer to maintain the code.

Code changes have been quite substantial this round (we were as shocked as you), that's why this version took 7 months to complete; expect more frequent version updates in the future - a 6 weeks turnaround is usual for my Add-ons.

I am already planning some important changes for August / September in case Stationery won't be updated (I reached out to the author for many months but he didn't react anymore - maybe he walked away because of lack of time) - one of the problems with the expectation of "a working product" is that people do not know how much work is involved to keep it up to date.

My code repository: https://github.com/RealRaven2000/SmartTemplate4/

Code differences since 2.0: https://github.com/RealRaven2000/SmartTemplate4/commit/48747954550ed00d2dadcdaf211cb9da0f7e3517

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on Aug. 2, 2019 · permalink

Thanks for the kind words - makes the last 7 years of work worth it. Btw SmartTemplate will not stop you from working with it if you do not buy a standard license, but there may be some mild nagging after the trial period ends. You are also eligible for a free license if you contribute as a developer or translator.

Finding a socially just way of monetization is a delicate balance, if I can convince 20% of my users to help with funding the development in the next year I will be very happy.

If you read the explanation on the contributions page you will see that it will only be more work to keep up with the changes in Thunderbird in the future, which simply cannot be done for free.

I basically spend most of my weekends and a few hours every day with work on my Add-ons; this is partly free support, fixing my own bugs, writing new features, fixing the stuff that Mozilla broke for me and updating the support site. ON top of that I review other people's add-ons for atn (voluntary & unpaid) and advocate for Thunderbird supporting (classic = useful) Add-ons in the future,

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on Aug. 1, 2019 · permalink

De rien!

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on Oct. 7, 2018 · permalink

What I do is use the Stationery Add-on in conjunction with SmartTempalte⁴. The current paradigm stores the each template against an identity so workaround is making multiple identities and a set of templates for each of them. This was the paradigm when I inherited the Add-on years ago and then I was already using Stationery for managing multiple external HTML templates. I didn't want to re-invent the wheel and potentially loose existing users (including Marc who maintained the Add-on after the original developer had left) who were used to the "1 template per identity" setup.

Click on Global Settings and then the "Stationery Addon" button for further instructions.

Should Stationery go away I will gladly add Template Management functionality.

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on March 26, 2018 · permalink

quote (from google translate):
>> I have letters from different sites in support from one of my addresses, accordingly, there is no question of any "Reply" (since the address will always be mine, if I press an answer). I just copy the text of the question in the text of the message and click the mouse to the address to which I must respond - that's how I get this copied text at once in the text of the template that I will create to answer the query?

If I understand you correctly you want to be more flexible in your replies. I highly recommend to install Stationery in order to have different templates, according to each purpose. We cannot currently support clipboard, as SmartTemplate4 does all its processing automatically when the Composer Window is opened, so requiring it to support the clipboard would be a BIG change; however please be encouraged to submit your feature requests (and contact with us directly) here:

http://smarttemplate4.mozdev.org/bugs.html

If possible, use google translate or a friend to translate your queries to English or German, it is hard to do international support for 18k+ users for free.

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on Nov. 18, 2017 · permalink

...but you can download a version that doesn't stop the latest Thunderbird versions from starting here:
https://www.mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=26446
however there are still a few issues with this, pleasee subscribe to the bug to be notified of final fixes.

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on Jan. 4, 2017 · permalink

...we are usually pretty good at that when we get more detail.

http://smarttemplate4.mozdev.org/
bottom of page!

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on July 21, 2016 · permalink

.. on our support site:
http://smarttemplate4.mozdev.org/bugs.html
there is also a link to contact us directly on the bottom of the page

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on April 20, 2015 · permalink

The problem with this bug is that it cannot be fixed without a total rewrite. We had 3 developers trying to fix it, but the bottom line is that we would need to read the file in asynchronously and that would destroy the current architecture of the Add-on plus very likely remove Stationery support. Unless we get another developer to look at this we will likely not be able to fix it. Here is the detail:

https://www.mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=25887

by Realraven (Axel Grude) (Developer) on Sept. 10, 2014 · permalink

... which you can turn off here:
ST4 options / Advanced Settings / Name Rules:
switch off "Capitalize Names"
Also, we are grateful for bug reports and suggestions for new features at the support web site: http://smarttemplate4.mozdev.org/bugs.html