@ikenga/skill-thunderbird

Thunderbird mail skill for Ikenga — read/search the local Thunderbird mbox store, and save reply drafts to the IMAP server for the user to review and send.

Portable and project-agnostic: it discovers the profile from TBIRD_PROFILE (or the per-OS defaults) and resolves the mailbox password from the host secret store at run time. No hardcoded paths or account-specific credential names.

Install

npx skills add royalti-io/skill-thunderbird   # publish deferred (supervised)

Or via the Ikenga CLI once the 3-copy publish sync is wired (WP-14 pattern).

What it does

| Capability | Path | Description | |---|---|---| | Read | local mbox | Search and extract emails from the offline-store mbox files (by sender, date, subject; large-mailbox tail handling; MIME header decoding). Never modifies the store or syncs IMAP. | | Write drafts | IMAP APPEND | Place a drafted reply into the user's Drafts folder by appending it to the IMAP server with the \Draft flag — correctly threaded (In-Reply-To / References). This is the only write path. |

It does not send mail. The draft-write path goes to the server, never the local mbox — writing a draft into the local offline-store mbox does not work (Thunderbird displays the server view via the .msf index, so a local-only draft never appears and is dropped on compaction). See the skill body for the full mechanism.

Why a separate pkg from @ikenga/skill-mail

skill-mail is dispatch-only over ikenga.db (sqlite.tables, no net, no fs). This skill operates on the local OS mail store and the IMAP server, so it needs a different permission set — fs.read (profile mbox files), shell.execute (grep/stat/etc.), net (IMAP), and vault.keys (mailbox credentials). Keeping it separate preserves skill-mail's tight, sqlite-only contract.

Permissions

| Permission | Why | |---|---| | shell.execute | grep / stat / pgrep / tail / sed for mbox search; node / npx to run the IMAP-append draft helper. | | fs.read | Read-only access to the Thunderbird profile mbox files across the per-OS profile locations. | | fs.write | $pkg_data scratch for large-mailbox extraction only. | | net | IMAP/IMAPS connection for the draft APPEND. | | vault.keys | Mailbox IMAP credentials (*IMAP* key glob), resolved from the host vault at run time — never inlined. |

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE (monorepo root).

Phase

Initial skeleton. Publish sync deferred (supervised) — held changeset + "private": true.