What is thunderbird-email?

A tool for reading and searching email stored locally by Thunderbird, an email application, and for saving reply drafts to an IMAP mail server. It does not send mail.

Use it to find payment receipts, billing notices, newsletter material, or industry information, and to save—not send—reply drafts.

It avoids manually searching mail files and provides a controlled way to place drafted replies in the server's Drafts folder.

thunderbird-email — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by ikenga-hq

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add ikenga-hq/ikenga-pkgs --skill thunderbird-email

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ikenga-hq/ikenga-pkgs

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ikenga-hq/ikenga-pkgs/thunderbird-email/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ikenga-hq/ikenga-pkgs/thunderbird-email)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ikenga-hq/ikenga-pkgs/thunderbird-email"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ikenga-hq/ikenga-pkgs/thunderbird-email/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ikenga-hq/ikenga-pkgs/thunderbird-email"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ikenga-hq/ikenga-pkgs/thunderbird-email.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 101 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,880 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00101	$0.02880
Opus 5.5	$0.00040	$0.01152
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00020	$0.00576
Haiku 4.5	$0.00010	$0.00288

Measured 2mo ago against content hash b82c736a7be3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

thunderbird-email scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

packages/skills/thunderbird/skills/thunderbird-email/SKILL.md · 309 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 309 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Thunderbird Email Skill

Access the user's local Thunderbird mail store. Two capabilities:

Read (mbox) — search and extract emails from the local offline-store mbox files. Does not modify the store or sync IMAP.
Write drafts (IMAP APPEND) — place a drafted reply into the user's Drafts folder by appending it to the IMAP server (see Writing drafts). This is the ONLY write path, and it goes to the server, never the local mbox. The skill does not send mail.

Profile path

Set TBIRD_PROFILE to your Thunderbird profile directory. Defaults vary by OS:

OS	Default profile location
Linux (snap)	`~/snap/thunderbird/common/.thunderbird/<profile-id>.default`
Linux (apt)	`~/.thunderbird/<profile-id>.default-release`
macOS	`~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/<profile-id>.default-release`
Windows	`%APPDATA%\Thunderbird\Profiles\<profile-id>.default-release`

Find your profile id by opening Thunderbird → Help → Troubleshooting Information → Profile Folder.

export TBIRD_PROFILE="$HOME/.thunderbird/abcd1234.default-release"

Account map

Each IMAP account lives under $TBIRD_PROFILE/ImapMail/<server-hostname>/. List your servers with:

ls "$TBIRD_PROFILE/ImapMail/"

A typical layout, given an account [email protected] hosted at mail.example.com:

File	Purpose
`$TBIRD_PROFILE/ImapMail/mail.example.com/INBOX`	Top-level inbox mbox
`$TBIRD_PROFILE/ImapMail/mail.example.com/INBOX.sbd/Sent`	Sent folder
`$TBIRD_PROFILE/ImapMail/mail.example.com/INBOX.sbd/Drafts`	Drafts
`$TBIRD_PROFILE/ImapMail/mail.example.com/INBOX.sbd/<Label>`	Custom labels (Thunderbird subfolders)

The .sbd suffix is Thunderbird's mail-store-directory convention — INBOX itself is an mbox file, while its subfolders live under INBOX.sbd/.

File ordering

Thunderbird does NOT guarantee a fixed ordering inside mbox files. Different servers/accounts may append at either end depending on IMAP sync direction and history. When in doubt, parse the full file and sort by the Date: header rather than relying on file order.

Read the full file on GitHub · 309 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 309 lines · 101 tokens per session scan A b82c736a7be3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

thunderbird-email is a skill published in the GitHub repository ikenga-hq/ikenga-pkgs (0 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 101 tokens to every session and 2,880 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

thunderbird-email next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
thunderbird-emailikenga-hq/ikenga-pkgs	Skill	0	today	Apache-2.0	A	101	Claude Code, Codex
imagegenopenai/codex	Skill	134k	today	Apache-2.0	A	113	Codex
local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners	Skill	79k	yesterday	MIT	A	200	Claude Code, Codex
playwright-climicrosoft/playwright	Skill	100k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	19	Claude Code
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