Thread Summarizer (Ollama) for Thunderbird

Summarizes the email thread of the displayed message with a local Ollama model, right inside Thunderbird. A Riassumi thread button on the message header opens a panel with a structured triage summary — TL;DR, key points, actions & deadlines, and who is waiting for a reply.

No email content ever leaves your machine. The only network host the extension contacts is your local Ollama endpoint (http://localhost:11434 by default). No cloud, no telemetry, no third-party calls, no bundled runtime dependencies. Summaries live in session memory only and are never written to disk.

The summary text is produced in Italian (v1). Endpoint, model and thread size are configurable in the add-on options.

Requirements

• Thunderbird ≥ 128
• Ollama running locally with at least one chat model installed, e.g. ollama pull gemma3

One-time Ollama setup

Ollama rejects requests coming from browser extensions unless their origin is allowed. Configure it once, then restart Ollama so it picks up the change.

macOS

launchctl setenv OLLAMA_ORIGINS "moz-extension://*"

Then quit Ollama from the menu-bar icon and reopen it.

Make it survive reboots. launchctl setenv is reset every time you restart your Mac. To set it permanently, run once (installs a per-user LaunchAgent; the script prints how to undo it):

bash scripts/persist-ollama-origins-macos.sh

Linux (systemd): add to the service via systemctl edit ollama.service

[Service]
Environment="OLLAMA_ORIGINS=moz-extension://*"

then sudo systemctl daemon-reload && sudo systemctl restart ollama.

Windows: set a system environment variable OLLAMA_ORIGINS to moz-extension://*, then restart Ollama.

If you skip this step the panel shows a clear message with the exact command to run.

Install

From a release (recommended)

1. Download the latest tb-thread-summarizer-<version>.xpi from the Releases page.
2. Thunderbird → Add-ons Manager → gear icon → Install Add-on From File… → pick the .xpi.

From source

git clone https://github.com/capazme/tb-thread-summarizer.git
cd tb-thread-summarizer
npm install && npm test
npm run package   # produces dist/tb-thread-summarizer-<version>.xpi

Usage

Open any message → click Riassumi thread in the message-header toolbar. The first summary of a thread streams in; reopening the same thread is instant (session cache). Use Rigenera to force a fresh summary, Copia to copy the text, and the gear icon to open options.

How it works

1. The thread of the displayed message is reconstructed from the References / In-Reply-To headers, with a normalized-subject fallback.
2. Each message is reduced to clean text (quotes and signatures stripped) and assembled into a single chronological transcript, trimmed to a context budget.
3. The transcript is sent to Ollama's /api/chat with a fixed triage prompt; the response streams back into the panel.
4. Generation runs in the background page, so closing the popup does not cancel it; the finished summary is cached for the session.

Development

• npm install — dev tooling only (Vitest; the extension itself has zero runtime dependencies and no build step)
• npm test — 47 unit tests over the pure logic modules
• Load for development: Tools → Developer Tools → Debug Add-ons → Load Temporary Add-on… → select manifest.json
• Manual end-to-end checklist: docs/manual-test-checklist.md

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

Privacy

Email content is sent exclusively to the configured Ollama endpoint. Summaries are held in extension session storage and cleared when Thunderbird quits. Settings contain no personal data. The extension requests only messagesRead, storage, and host access to localhost/127.0.0.1:11434.

License

Mozilla Public License 2.0 © capazme