Question

I am trying to send and receive mail of known structure from a GMail account without user intervention.

Is there an elegant way to make IMAP and SMTP connections from a Firefox extension without overcomplicating things by involving C++ or Python?

Answer 1

You have to use nsISocketTransportService.createTransport() to open a connection, something like this:

var Cc = Components.classes;
var Ci = Components.interfaces;

var socket = Cc["@mozilla.org/network/socket-transport-service;1"]
               .getService(Ci.nsISocketTransportService)
               .createTransport(["ssl"], 1, "pop.gmail.com", 995, null);

var input = socket.openInputStream(Ci.nsITransport.OPEN_UNBUFFERED, 0, 0);
var scriptableInput = Cc["@mozilla.org/scriptableinputstream;1"]
                        .createInstance(Ci.nsIScriptableInputStream);
scriptableInput.init(input);


var output = socket.openOutputStream(Ci.nsITransport.OPEN_UNBUFFERED, 0, 0);

This gets you an input and output stream. You can receive data via nsIScriptableInputStream.read() and send it via nsIOutputStream.write(). But you would still have to implement IMAP/SMTP logic yourself (you cannot use the current implementation in Thunderbird at it is written in C++ and the new JavaScript-based implementation isn’t ready yet).