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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T14:41:39+00:00

I want to make a small plugin for awesome WM that will show a

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I want to make a small plugin for awesome WM that will show a number of unread messages pending in Thunderbird. I want to fetch the number of messages accessing directly Thunderbird sqlite base. The question is: which base, table and fields should I query?

There are at least 15 bases under ~/.thunderbird/profile/, including ./global-messages-db.sqlite. In this base I tried messageAttributes table, but with no big success. I could not find development documentation describing the attributes…

Any help here?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You will find what you need in the global-messages-db.sqlite file. If you watch the messages table, you will find a column jsonAttributes. In there you will find a JSON array, from attribute ids and their value. The key 58 is the read-status of a message. So if you find something like {"58": false} in this column the message is still unread. But this database won’t be updated immediately when a new message is received. (It might even be updated only, when you close Thunderbird — I am not sure about that.)

    So as you see finding unread messages that way will be a bit of the hard way to go. I would recommend you to better create a plugin, that is directly checking the server via IMAP or POP3.

    For IMAP servers there already exist an awesome-plugin inside the Delightful Extensions. I don’t know of any POP3 plugin, and as it seems POP3 libs for lua are also rare to find.

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