by Philipp Kewisch (Developer) on June 7, 2025 · permalink

I can understand that. It is not wrong, in theory the add-on *could* do anything, so the permission needs to sound scary. This is required because Thunderbird is lacking extension APIs for calendaring. So I need to use the legacy extension system, which can integrate tightly with Thunderbird itself, and has the same permissions as Thunderbird itself.

I'm trying to change this by writing the APIs and hope either I or someone else from Thunderbird will find time to integrate them. Then it will just say something like "full access to your calendar" or something like that.

The source code for this add-on is available at https://github.com/kewisch/gdata-provider/tree/legacy to verify, and if you prefer non-code trust signals note I've been working for/with Thunderbird for almost 20 years. You can find more information about me on Linkedin or other sources.

by Philipp Kewisch (Developer) on June 7, 2025 · permalink

This add-on simply connects Thunderbird and Google Tasks. How Thunderbird displays tasks is beyond my control. I'd need to write a whole new tasks view instead of integrating into Thunderbird. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194863 is what needs to be fixed, then I can integrate subtasks.

You can make tasks appear in the calendar view by going to View > Calendar > Current View > Tasks in View. It is pretty hidden unfortunately.

There is one shortcoming related to task dates/times not showing, which in turn is a missing field in Google's Task API.

Now that all probably doesn't help a bit for usability, and I'd love to see this look/work better in Thunderbird, but I wanted to explain why I haven't done more in this area :)