I've been working on Thunderbird Conversations for more than a year now, and I've learned a lot about Thunderbird internals over the past months. I thought I'd share some thoughts on the design of Thunderbird Conversations, in the hope that it helps would-be extension authors better grasp the design and the relationship between Gloda, libmime, the message headers, and the message database.

This is the first blog post in a series. In this post, I'll talk how various parts of Thunderbird interact together. In another post, I'll talk about the Thunderbird Conversations design.